The evolution of property from savagery to civilization

NUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE

TRENT UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE

Evolution of Property

FROM

Savagery to Civilization

By PAUL LAFARGUE

CHICAGO

CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
CO-OPERATIVE

VY^) -\M -Vv\

“The economic structure of society is the real basis on which the
juridical and political superstructure is raised, and to which definite
social forms of thought correspond : in short, the mode of produc¬
tion determines the character of the social, political, and intellectual
life generally.”

Kabl Marx, Capital.

“A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of property
would embody, in some respects, the most remarkable portion of the
mental history of mankind.”

Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society.

172864

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CONTENTS

Chapteb Page

I. Forms of Contemporaneous Property. 7

II. Primitive Communism . 20

III. Family or Consanguine Collectivism. 45

IV. Feudal Property . 75

V. Bourgeois Property . 126

THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY

CHAPTER I

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY

Political economists have laid it down as an
axiom that Capital, the form of property at pres¬
ent predominant, is eternal; they have tasked
their brains to show that capital is coeval with
the world, and that as it has had no beginning, so
it can have no end.* In proof of which astound¬
ing assertion all the manuals of political economy
repeat with much complacency the story of the
savage who, having in his possession a couple of
bows, lends one of them to a brother savage, for a
share in the produce of his chase.

So great were the zeal and ardor which econo¬
mists brought to bear on their search for capital¬
istic property in prehistoric times, that they suc¬
ceeded, in the course of their investigations, in
discovering the existence of property outside the
human species, to wit, among the invertebrates :
for the ant, in her foresight, is a hoarder of pro¬
visions. It is a pity that they should not have
gone a step farther, and affirmed that, if the ant
lays up stores, she does so with a view to sell the

•By capital is meant anything which produces interest: a snm
of money lent, which at the end of months, or years, yields a profit;
land that is cultivated, or any instrument of labor that is set in
action not by its proprietor, but by salaried workmen ; but the land
which is cultivated by the peasant and his family, the gun of the
poacher, the plane or hammer of the carpenter, albeit property, is
not capitalistic property, because the owner utilizes it himself in¬
stead of using it to extract surplus value from others. The notion
of profit without labor sticks like a Nessus-shirt to the term capital.

8 FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY

same and realize a profit by the circulation of her
capital.

But there is a gap in the economists’ theory of
the eternity of capital. They have omitted to
show that the term capital likewise exists from all
time. In a ship every rope has its appropriate
name, with the exception of the bell rope. It is
inadmissible that in the domain of political
economy the terminology should have been so in¬
adequate as not to furnish a name for so useful
and all-important a thing as capital ; yet it is a
matter of fact that the term capital, in the modern
sense, dates no farther back than the 18th century.
This is the case also with the word philanthropy
(the humanitarian hypocrisy proper to the capital¬
istic regime). And it was in the 18th century that
capitalist property began to assert itself, and to
acquire a preponderating influence in society.
This social predominance of capital led to the
French Revolution, which, although one of the
most considerable events of modern history, was,
after all, but a bourgeois revolution accomplished
with those catchwords of liberty, fraternity,
equality, justice and patriotism which the bour¬
geois were, later on, to employ in puffing their
political and financial enterprises. At the time
of the Revolution the capitalists were cattle so
newly raised by society that in his “Dictionaire de
Mots Nouveaux,” published in 1802, Sebastien
Mercier thought it necessary to insert the word
capitaliste, and to append the following curious
definition : — “Capitaliste: this word is well nigh
unknown out of Paris. It designates a monster
of wealth, a man who has a heart of iron, and no

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY 9

affections save metallic ones. Talk to him of the
land tax — and he laughs at you ; he does not own
an inch of land, how should you tax him? Like
the Arabs of the desert who have plundered a
caravan, and who bury their gold out of fear of
other brigands, the capitalists have hidden away
our money.”

In 1802 mankind had not as yet acquired the
feeling of profound respect which in our day is
inspired by the capitalist.

The term capital, though of Latin origin, has
no equivalent in the Greek and Latin tongues.
The non-existence of the word in two such rich
languages affords a proof that capitalist property
did not exist in ancient times, at least as an eco¬
nomical and social phenomenon.

The form of property which corresponds to the
term capital was developed and acquired social
importance only after the establishment of com¬
mercial production, which crowned the econom¬
ical and political movement agitating Europe after
the 12th century. This commercial production
was stimulated by the discovery of America and
the route to India by the Cape of Good Hope, by
the importation of precious metals from America,
the taking of Constantinople, the invention of
printing, the family alliances among the sover¬
eigns of Europe, and the organization of the
great feudal states, with the relative and general
pacification which resulted therefrom. All these
and other collateral causes co-operated to create
a rapid development of capital, the most perfect
of all forms of private property, and, it may be
averred, the last. The comparatively recent ap-

10 FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY

pearance of capital is the best proof adducible that
property is not immutable and always the same,
but that, on the contrary, it, like all material and
intellectual phenomena, incessantly evolves and
passes through a series of forms which differ, but
are derived, from one another.

So far indeed is property from being always
identical that in our own society it affects divers
forms, capable of being reduced to two principal

'a. Common property of ancient
origin , the type of which are
the communal lands, exposed
for centuries past to the en¬
croachments of the nobility
and bourgeoisie.

" b. Common property of modern
origin, administered by the
State, comprised under the
term Public Services, (the
Mint, Post Office, Public
Roads, National Libraries, Mu-
^ seums, etc.)

{a. Property of personal appro¬
priation.

b. Property. — Instruments of
labor.

c. Property. — Capital.

(a.) Property of personal appropriation be¬
gins with the food one eats, and extends to the
articles of clothing and objects of luxury (rings,
jewels, etc.), with which one covers and decks
oneself. Time was when the house, too, was in¬
cluded in this branch of personal property ; a man
possessed his dwelling, a marble palace or a hut
of straw, like the tortoise his shell. If by the
application of machinery to industry, civilization

I. Forms of
Common Property.

II. Forms of
Private Property.

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY 11

has placed numberless objects of luxury within
the reach of the poor which hitherto have been
purchasable by the rich alone, it has on the other
hand deprived the bulk of the nation of their
dwelling-house. It constrains them to live in
hired apartments and furnished lodgings ; and in
the midst of unprecedented wealth it has reduced
the producer to a strict minimum of property of
personal appropriation.

Capitalist civilization condemns the proletarian
to vegetate in conditions of existence inferior to
those of the savage. To waive the important
fact that the savage does not labor for others, and
to confine ourselves wholly to the question of
food, it is indisputable that the barbarians who
invaded and peopled Europe, and who, possess¬
ing as they did, herds of swine and other ani¬
mals, and having within their reach all the re¬
sources of the chase in richly stocked forests,
and of fishing in the seas and rivers — if ill-clad
with the skins of wild beasts and coarsely-woven
materials — partook of more animal food than do
our proletarians, whose shoddy clothing, excel¬
lently woven by perfected machinery, is a very
poor protection against the inclemencies of the
weather. The condition of the proletarian is the
harder in that his constitution is less robust and
less inured to the rigor of the climate than was
the body of the savage. The following fact af¬
fords an idea of the robustness of uncivilized
man. In the prehistoric tombs of Europe skulls
have been discovered bearing traces of perfora¬
tions suggestive of trepanning. Anthropologists
at first took these skulls for amulets or orna-

12 FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY

ments, and concluded that they had been per¬
forated after death, until Broca showed that
the operation could not have been performed on
corpses by producing a number of skulls in which
a process of cicatrisation was observable, that
could not have taken place unless the trepanned
person had survived the operation. It was ob¬
jected that it must have been impossible for
ignorant savages, with their rude instruments of
bronze and silex, to practice so delicate an opera¬
tion, considered dangerous by modern doctors,
despite their learning and the excellence of their
surgical instruments. But all doubts have been
now removed by the positive knowledge that this
kind of operation is practiced by savages with
perfect success. Among the Berbers of the pres¬
ent day the operation is performed in the open air,
and after the lapse of a few days, to the infinite
astonishment of European witnesses, the tre¬
panned man is on his legs again and resumes his
occupations just as if a portion of his skull had
not been scraped away, for the operation is per¬
formed by scraping. Skull wounds, which entail
such grave complications in civilized persons,
heal with extraordinary quickness and ease in
primitive peoples. Notwithstanding the frantic
enthusiasm with which civilization inspires the
philistine, the physical, and maybe the mental,
inferiority of the civilized man, allowing, of
course, for exceptions, must be conceded. It will
require an education beginning at the cradle and
prolonged throughout life and continued for
several generations to restore to the human being
of future society the vigor and perfection of the

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY 13

senses which characterise the savage and the
barbarian.* Morgan, one of the rare anthropolo¬
gists who do not share the imbecile disdain pro¬
fessed for the savage and the barbarian by the
philistine, was also the first to classify in logical
order the abundant and often contradictory ma¬
terials that have accumulated respecting savage
races, and to trace the first outlines of the evolu¬
tion of prehistoric man. He observes, “It may
be suggested as not improbable of ultimate
recognition that the progress of mankind in the
period of savagery, in its relation to the sum of
human progress, was greater in degree than in
the three sub-periods of barbarism, and that the
progress made in the whole period of barbarism
was, in like manner, greater in degree than it has
been since the entire period of civilization.”!
The savage or barbarian transplanted into civil¬
ized society cuts a sorry figure : he loses his na¬
tive good qualities, while he contracts the dis¬
eases and acquires the vices of civilized man;
but the history of the Greeks and the Egyptians
shows us how marvelous a degree of material
and intellectual development a barbarous people
is capable of attaining when placed in the requi¬
site conditions and evolving freely.

•Cffisar, to whom the panegyrists ot our society allow certain
powers of observation, never wearied of admiring the strength and
skill In bodily exercises of the German barbarians whom he was
forced to combat. So great was his admiration for them, that in
order to overcome the heroic resistance of the Gauls, commanded by
Vercingetorix, he sent across the Rhine into Germany for cavalry
and light-armed infantry, who were used to engage among them;
and as they were mounted on bad horses he took those of the mili¬
tary tribunes, the knights and veterans, and distributed them
among the Germans, — “De Bello Galileo, ” vii. 65.

f Lewis Morgan. "Ancient Society,” Part 1, chap. III. "Ratio
of Human Progress.”

14 FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY

The civilized producer is reduced to the mini¬
mum of personal property necessary for the
satisfaction of his most urgent wants merely be¬
cause the capitalist possesses means and to spare
for the indulgence of his most extravagant
fancies. The capitalist should have a hundred
heads and a hundred feet, like the Hecatonchiri
of Greek mythology, if he would utilize the hats
and boots that encumber his wardrobe. If the
proletarians suffer from the want of personal
property, the capitalists end by becoming the
martyrs of a superfluity thereof. The ennui
which oppresses them, and the maladies which
prey on them, deteriorating and undermining the
race, are the consequences of an excess of the
means of enjoyment.

( b .) Private property in the instruments of
labor.

Man, according to Franklin’s definition, is a
tool-making animal. It is the manufacture of
tools which distinguishes man from the brutes,
his ancestors. Monkeys make use of sticks and
stones, man is the only animal that has wrought
silex for the manufacture of arms and tools, so
that the discovery of a stone implement in a
cavern or geological stratum is proof as positive
of the presence of a human being as the human
skeleton itself. The instrument of labor, the
silex knife of the savage, the plane of the car¬
penter, the bistouri of the surgeon, the microscope
of the physiologist, or the plough of the peasant,
is an addition to man’s organs which facilitates
the satisfaction of his wants.

So long as petty manual industry prevails, the

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY 15

free producer is the proprietor of his instruments
of labor. In the middle ages the journeyman
traveled with his bag of tools, which never left
him ; the yeoman, even before the constitution of
private property, temporarily possessed the patch
of land which was allotted to him in the terri¬
torial partition ; the mediaeval serf was so closely
connected with the soil he cultivated as to be in¬
separable therefrom.

There remain many vestiges of this private
property in the instruments of labor, but they are
fast disappearing. In all the industries which
have been seized on by machinery, the individual
implement has been torn out of the worker’s
hand and replaced by the machine tool — a collect¬
ive instrument of labor which can no longer be
the property of the producer. Capitalism divests
man of his personal property, the tool ; and the
first perfect instruments he had manufactured for
himself, his weapons of defense, were the first to
be wrested from him. The savage is the pro¬
prietor of his bow and arrows, which constitute
at one and the same time his arms and his tools,
historically the most perfected. The soldier was
the first proletarian who was stripped of his
tools, i. e., his arms, which belong to the govern¬
ment that enrolls him.

Capitalistic society has reduced to a minimum
the personal property of the proletarian. It was
impossible to go further without causing the
death of the producer — the capitalists’ goose that
lays the golden eggs. It tends to dispossess him
altogether of his instruments of labor, a spolia¬
tion which is already an accomplished fact for
the great bulk of workers.

16 FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY
(c) Property Capital.

The capital form of property is the truly typical
form of property in modern society. In no other
society has it existed as a universal or dominant
fact.

The essential condition of this form of property
is the exploitation of the free producer, who is
robbed hourly of a fraction of the value he cre¬
ates ; a fact which Marx has demonstrated beyond
refutation. Capital is based on the production of
commodities, on a form of production, that is, in
which a man produces in view, not of the con¬
sumption of the laborer, or of that of his feudal
lord or slave-owning master, but in view of the
market. In other societies, also, men bought
and sold, but it was the surplus articles alone
that were exchanged. In those societies the
laborer, slave, or serf, was exploited, it is true,
but the proprietor had at least certain obligations
towards him ; e. g., the slaveholder was bound to
feed his human beast of burden whether he
worked or not. The capitalist has been released
from all charges, which now rest upon the free
laborer. It roused the indignation of the good
natured Plutarch that Cato, the sour moralist,
rid himself of slaves grown old and decrepit in
his service. What would he have said of the
modern capitalist, who allows the workers that
have enriched him to starve or to die in the
workhouse? In emancipating the slave and bond-
man, it was not the liberty of the producer that
the capitalist sought to compass but the liberty
of capital, which had to be discharged of all
obligations towards the workmen. It is only

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY 17

when the capital form of property is in force that
the proprietor can exercise in all its stringency
the right to use and abuse.

These are the extant forms of property in
modern society. Even a superficial view thereof
will convince us that these forms are themselves
undergoing change ; e. g., while communal prop¬
erty of ancient origin is being converted into
private property, private capitalistic property is
being turned into common property administered
by the State ; but before attaining this ultimate
form, capital dispossesses the producer of his
individual tool and creates the collective instru¬
ment of labor.

Now having convinced ourselves that the ex¬
istent forms of property are in a state of flux and
evolution, we must be blind indeed if we refuse
to admit that in the past also property was un¬
stable, and that it has passed through different
phases before arriving at the actual forms, which
must, in their turn, resolve themselves and be
replaced by other novel forms.

******

In this essay I propose to treat of the various
forms of property anterior to its assumption of
the capital form. Before entering on my subject
[ would premise a few particulars touching the
method employed by me in this attempt at a
partial reconstruction of history.

All men, without distinction of race or color,
from the cradle to the grave, pass through the
same phases of development. They experience

18 FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY

at ages, which vary within narrow limits, accord¬
ing to race, climate, and conditions of existence,
the same crises of growth, maturity, and decay.
In like manner human societies traverse analo¬
gous social, religious, and political forms, with the
ideas which correspond thereto. To Vico, who
has been styled “the father of the philosophy of
history,” is due the honor of having been the first
to apprehend the great law of historical develop¬
ment.

In his “Scienza Nuova” he speaks of “an ideal,
eternal history, in accordance with which are suc¬
cessively developed the histories of all nations,
from what state soever of savagery, ferocity, or
barbarism men progress towards domestication.”*

If we could ascertain the history of a people
from the state of savagery to that of civilization,
we should have the typical history of each of the
peoples that have inhabited the globe. It is out
of our power to reconstruct that history, for it is
impossible for us to reascend the successive
stages travelled by a people in their course of
progress. But if we cannot cut out this history,
all of a piece, of the life of a nation or a race, we
can, at any rate, reconstruct it by piecing to¬
gether the scattered data which we possess re¬
specting the different peoples of the globe. It is
in this wise that humanity, as it grows older,
learns to decipher the story of its infancy.

The manners and usages of the forefathers of

*TJna etoria ideal, eterna, sopra la quale corrono In tempo le
atorle dl tuttl le nazioni : ch’ovumque da tempi selyaggi, ferooi e
fieri comminciamo gli uominl ad addimestlearsi. (G. Vico, Principi
di Scienza Nuova. De’ Prlncipi Libero secondo, Section V. ed. dl
Ferrari. Milano, 1837.)

FORMS OF CONTEMPORANEOUS PROPERTY 19

civilized nations survive in those of the savage
peoples whom civilization has not wholly exter¬
minated. The investigations of the customs,
social and political institutions, religious and
mental conceptions of barbarians, made by men
of learning and research in both hemispheres,
enable u's to evoke a past which we had come to
consider as irrecoverably lost. Among savage
peoples, we can detect the beginnings of prop¬
erty: by gleaning facts in all parts of the globe,
and by co-ordinating them into a logical series,
we may succeed in following the different phases
of the evolution of property.

CHAPTER II

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

I

If political economists so confidently refer
capital to the childhood of humanity, it is because
they indulge themselves in a convenient ignorance
of the customs of primitive peoples.*

There are savages at present in existence who
have no conception of landed property, whether
private or collective, and who have barely ar¬
rived at a notion of individual ownership of the
objects which they personally appropriate. Cer¬
tain Australians possess, for all personal property,
the objects attached to their persons, such as
arms, ornaments inserted in their ears, lips, and
noses ; or skins of beasts for clothing ; human
fat, wherewith to cure their rheumatism ; stones
laid up in baskets, woven of bark, fastened to the
body of the owner. Personally appropriated by
them, so to say incorporated with them, these
objects are not taken away from them at their
death, but are burned or buried with their

•In his recent and notorious discussion with Mr. Herbert Spencer,
the learned Professor Huxley, who acts as a champion of capital,
and who calls Rousseau an ignoramus, has given a remarkable proof
of his ignorance of the customs of savages which he discusses with
such assurance. “The confident assertions,” wrote the learned pro¬
fessor in the Nineteenth Century of January, 1890, “that the land
was originally held in common by the whole nation are singularly
ill-founded." “Land was held as private or several property, and
not as the property of the public or general body of the nation."

20

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

21

corpses. Names are among the primary indi¬
vidual property we meet with. The savage never
reveals his name to a stranger; it is a precious
thing of which he will make a present to a friend :
so completely is his name identified with his
person, that after his death his tribe ceases to
pronounce it. For an object to become individual
property, it must be really or fictitiously incor¬
porated with the person of the proprietor : when
the savage desires to intimate that an object be¬
longs to him, he will simulate the appropriation
of it by licking it with his tongue ; the Esquimaux
after buying any article, if but a needle, imme¬
diately applies it to his mouth, or he will con¬
secrate the object by a symbolical act, significa¬
tive of his intention to keep the same for his
personal use: this is the origin of taboo.

Manufactured articles are, in like manner,
owned only if they have been appropriated ; thus,
an Esquimaux cannot possess more than two
canoes ; the third is at the disposal of the clan :
whatsoever the proprietor does not use is con¬
sidered as property without an owner. A savage
never holds himself responsible for the loss of a
canoe or any other borowed implement for hunt¬
ing or fishing, and never dreams of restoring it.

If the savage is incapable of conceiving the
idea of individual posession of objects not in¬
corporated with his person, it is because he has
no conception of his individuality as distinct from
the consanguine group in which he lives. The
savage is environed by such perpetual material
danger, and compassed round with such constant
imaginary terrors that he cannot exist in a state

22

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

of isolation ; he cannot even form a notion of the
possibility of such a thing. To expel a savage
from his clan, his horde, is tantamount to con¬
demning him to death ; among the prehistoric
Greeks, as among all barbarians, a murder in¬
tentional or by accident of one of the members
of the clan was punished by exile. Orestes, after
the assassination of his mother, was compelled to
expatriate himself to appease the public indigna¬
tion ; in very advanced civilizations, like those of
Greece and Italy in historic times, exile was con¬
sidered the worst of penalties. “The exile,” says
the Greek poet Theognis, “has neither friends
nor faithful comrades, the most doleful thing in
exile.” To be divided from his companions, to
live alone, seemed a fearful thing to primeval
man, accustomed to live in troops.

Savages, even though individually completer
beings, seeing that they are self-sufficing, than
are civilized persons, are so thoroughly identified
with their hordes and clans that their individ¬
uality does not make itself felt either in the
family or in property.*

The clan was all in all ; the clan was the family ;

•In savage hordes there exists no private family, not even the
matriarchal one. The children belong to the entire horde, and they
call mother, indifferently their own mother, the sisters of their
mother and the women of the same age as their mother. When, in
process of time, the sexual relations, at first promiscuous, began to
be restricted, prior to the appearance of the “pairing family,” there
obtained the common marriage of the clan. All the women of one
clan were the wives of the men of another clan, and, reciprocally,
all the men of that clan were the joint husbands of the women ;
when they met, it was only necessary for them to recognize each
other in order to legitimate a conjugal union. This curious form of
communist marriage has been observed in Australia by Messrs. Pison
and Howitt. Traces of it are discoverable in the mythological
legends of Greece.

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

23

it was the clan that married ; it was the clan,
again, that was the owner of property. In the
clan all things are in common : the bushman of
Africa who receives a present divides it among
all the members of his horde ; when he has cap¬
tured an animal or found any object he shares his
booty with his comrades, frequently reserving for
himself the smallest portion. In times of famine,
the young Fuegians explore the coast, and if they
chance to light upon any Cetaceous animal (a
favorite dainty) they hasten, before touching it,
to inform their comrades of their find. These at
once hurry to the spot; whereupon the oldest
member of the party proceeds to portion out
equal shares to all.

Hunting and fishing, those two primitive modes
of production, are practiced jointly, and the prod¬
uce is shared, in common. According to Mar-
tius, the Botocudos, those dauntless tribes of
Brazil, organize their hunt in concert and never
abandon the spot on which an animal has been
captured until they have devoured it. The same
fact is reported of the Dacotas and the Aus¬
tralians. Even among those tribes in which the
chase in common is in abeyance, this ancient
mode of consuming the prey holds good : the
successful hunter invited to a feast all the mem¬
bers of his clan, of his village, and occasionally of
his tribe, to partake of his chase : they are, so to
say, national feasts. At Svarietie, in the Cau¬
casus, whenever a family slaughters an ox, a cow,
or a dozen sheep, it is the occasion of a village
feast; the villagers eat and drink together in
memory of the relations that have died in the

24

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

course of the year. The feasts of the dead are
reminiscences of these common repasts.

Morgan, who has so minutely studied the
primitive communist manners, in his last and im¬
portant work* describes the methods of hunting
and fishing practiced among the Redskins of
North America : — “The tribes of the plain, who
subsist almost exclusively upon animal food, show
in their usages in hunt the same tendency to com¬
munism. The Blackfeet, during the buffalo hunt,
follow the herd on horseback, in large parties,
composed of men, women, and children.

When the active pursuit of the herd com¬
mences, the hunters leave the dead animal in the
track of the chase, to be appropriated by the first
persons who come up behind. This method of
distribution is continued until all are supplied. . . .
They cut up the beef into strings, and either dry
it in the air or smoke it over a fire. Some make
part of the capture into pemmican, which consists
of dried and pulverized meat, mixed with melted
buffalo fat, which is boiled in the hide of the
animal. During the fishing season in the Colum¬
bia river, where fish is more abundant than in
any other river on the earth, all the members of
the tribe encamp together and make a common
stock of the fish obtained. They are divided each
day according to the number of women, giving
to each an equal share. The fishes are split open,
scarified and dried on scaffolds, after which they
are packed in baskets and removed to the vil¬
lages.”

•Lewis H. Morgan, “Houses and House Life of the American
Aborigines.” Washington, 1881.

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

25

When the savage ceases to lead a nomadic ex¬
istence, and when he settles and builds himself
a dwelling-house, the house is not a private but
a common one, even after the family has begun
to assume a matriarchal form. The communal
houses resemble those that La Perouse discovered
in Polynesia; they are 10 feet high, 110 feet in
length, and 10 feet in width, having the shape of
an inverted pirogue; the entrance was by doors
situated at both extremities, and they afforded
shelter for a clan of upwards of 100 persons. The
long houses of the Iroquois, which, according to
Morgan, disappeared before the commencement
of the present century, were 100 feet long by 30
broad, and 20 feet in height ; they were traversed
by a longitudinal passage having an opening at
both ends; into this passage, like the alveoles of
a hive, opened a series of small rooms, 7 feet in
width, in which dwelt the married women of the
clan. Each habitation bore the totem of the clan,
i. e., the animal supposed to be its ancestor. The
houses of the Dyaks of Borneo are similar, with
the difference that they are raised from 15 to 20
feet from the ground on posts of hard timber;
they recall the lake cities, built upon piles, dis¬
covered in the Swiss lakes. Herodotus says that
the Paeonians dwelt in houses of this description
in Lake Prasias (V., sec. 16). The casas grandes
of the Redskins of Mexico presented the appear¬
ance of an enormous stairway, with superim¬
posed stories, subdivided into cells for the
married people: not improbably it is in such like
communist dwellings that the prehistoric Greeks
lived, as may be inferred from the palace brought

26

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

to light in Argolis by the excavations of Dr.
Schliemann. In these communist dwelling-
houses the provisions are in common and the re¬
pasts are common.

We must turn to Morgan for a description of
the life of the inhabitants of these communal
houses. His researches were confined, it is true,
to the American Redskins, and principally the
Iroquois, amongst whom he had lived ; but as he
says, “when any usage is found among the Iro¬
quois in a definite or positive form, it renders
probable the existence of the same usage in other
tribes in the same condition, because their neces¬
sities were the same.”

“The Iroquois who formed a household, culti¬
vated gardens, gathered harvest, and stored it in
their dwellings as a common store. There was
more or less of individual ownership of these
products and of their possession by different
families. For example, the corn, after stripping
back the husk, was braided by the husk in
bunches and hung up in the different apartments ;
but when one family had exhausted its supply,
their wants were supplied by other families so
long as any remained ; each hunting or fishing
party made a common stock of the capture, of
which the surplus on their return was divided
among the several families of each household,
and, having been cured, were kept for winter
use.” In these Indian villages we note the
singular phenomenon of individual ownership
combined with common usage. “There is nothing
in the Indian house and family without its par¬
ticular owner,” remarks Heckewelder, in treating

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

27

of the Delawares and the Munsees; “every indi¬
vidual knows what belongs to him, from the
horse or cow to the dog, cat, or kitten and little
chicken. . . . For a litter of kittens or a

brood of chickens there are often as many owners
as there are individual animals. In purchasing a
hen with her brood one frequently has to deal
for it with several children. Thus while the prin¬
ciple of community of goods prevails in the state,
the nghts of property are acknowledged among
the members of the family.”*

The Indians of Laguna village (New Mexico)
had common stores. “Their women, generally,
have the control of the granary,” wrote the Rev.
Sam. Gorman to Morgan in 1869, “and they are
more provident than their Spanish neighbors
about the future ; they try to have a year’s pro¬
vision on hand. It is only when two years of
scarcity succeed each other that Pueblos, as a
community, suffer hunger.”

Among the Maya Indians food is prepared in
a hut, and every family sends for a portion.
Stephen saw a procession of women and children,
each carrying an earthen bowl containing a quan¬
tity of smoking hot broth, all coming down the
same road and disappearing among the different
houses.t

But among the Iroquois each household pre¬
pared the food of its members. A matron made

•Heckewelder. — “History, Manners, and Customs of Indian Na¬
tions who once inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States."
Reprinted in 1876. — Heckewelder lived as a missionary among the
American Indians for fifteen years, from 1771 to 1786, and was
conversant with their language.

tStephen. “Incidents of Travel In Yucatan,” II.

28

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

the division from the kettle to each family ac¬
cording to their needs ; it was served warm to
each person in earthen or wooden bowls. They
had neither tables, chairs, or plates, in our sense,
nor any room in the nature of a kitchen or a
dining-room, but ate each by himself, sitting or
standing where was most convenient to the per¬
son, the men eating first and by themselves, and
the women and children afterwards and by them¬
selves. That which remained was reserved for
any member of the household when hungry. To¬
wards evening the women cooked hominy, the
maize having been pounded into bits the size of a
grain of rice, which was boiled and put aside to
be used cold as a lunch in the morning and even¬
ing and for entertainment of visitors ; they had
neither formal breakfast nor supper ; each person,
when hungry, ate whatever food the house con¬
tained. They were moderate eaters. This, adds
Morgan, is a fair picture of Indian life in general
in America, when discovered.

Similar manners obtained in pre-historic
Greece, and the syssities (common repasts) of
historic times were but a reminiscence of the
primitive communist repasts. Heraclides of Pon-
tus, the disciple of Plato, has preserved for us a
description of the communistic repasts of Creta,
where the primitive manners prevailed during a
long period of time. At the andreies (repasts of
men) every adult citizen received an equal share,
except the Archon, member of the council of the
ancients ( geronia ), who received a fourfold por¬
tion — one in his quality of simple citizen, another
in that of president of the table, and two addi-

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

29

tional portions for the care of the hall and furni¬
ture. All the tables were under the supervision
of a matriarch, who distributed the food and os¬
tensibly set aside the choicest bits for the men
who had distinguished themselves in the council
or on the battlefield. Strangers were served first,
even before the archon. A vessel with wine and
water was handed round from guest to guest ; at
the end of the repast it was replenished. Hera-
clides mentions common repasts of the men only,
but Hoeck assumes that in the Dorian cities there
were also repasts of women and children. Our
knowledge of the constant separation of the sexes
among savages and barbarians renders probable
the assumption of the learned historian of Creta.
According to Aristotle the provisions for these
repasts were furnished by the harvests, the flocks
and herds, and the tributes of the serfs belonging
to the community ; hence we may infer that men,
women, and children, in Creta, were maintained
at the expense of the state. He asserts that these
repasts may be traced back to a very remote
antiquity; that it was Minos who established
them in Creta and Italus among the Oenotrians,
whom he taught agriculture; and as Aristotle
finds these common repasts still prevalent in
Italy, he concludes that they originated there,
ignoring the fact that they occur among all prim¬
itive peoples.*

Plutarch informs us that at these common re¬
pasts no one person was considered as superior to
the other, wherefore he styles them aristocratic

•Aristotle. ‘•Politics,”
;hap ix., sections 2, 3, 4.

Book II., chap, iii., section 4. Book IV.,
French ed., B. St. HHaire, 1848.

30

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

assemblies ( sunedria aristokratika). The persons
who sat down at the same table were probably
members of the same family. In Sparta the
members of a syssitia were formed into corre¬
sponding military divisions, and fought together.
Savages and barbarians, accustomed at all times
to act in common, in battle always range them¬
selves according to families, clans and tribes.

It was of such imperative necessity that every
member of the clan should get his share of the
aliments, that in the Greek language the word
moira, which signifies the portion of a guest at
a repast, came to signify Destiny, the supreme
Goddess to whom men and gods are alike sub¬
mitted and who deals out to everyone his portion
of existence, just as the matriarch of the Cretan
syssitia apportions to each guest his share of
food. It should be remarked that in Greek my¬
thology Destiny is personified by women — Moira,
Aissa, and the Keres — and that their names
signify the portion to which each person is en¬
titled in the division of victuals or spoils.

When the common dwelling house, sheltering
an entire clan, came to be sub-divided into private
houses, containing a single family, the repasts
ceased to be held in common, save on occasions of
religious and national solemnities, such as the
Greek syssities, which were celebrated in order to
preserve the memory of the past ; the provisions,
although individually possessed by each private
family, continue, practically, at the disposal of
the members of the tribe. “Every man, woman,
or child, in Indian communities,” says Catlin, “is
allowed to enter anyone’s lodge, and even that of

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

31

the chief of the nation, and eat when they are
hungry. Even so can the poorest and most
worthless drone of the nation ; if he is too lazy to
supply himself or to hunt, he can walk into any
lodge, and everyone will share with him as long
as there is anything to eat. He, however, who
thus begs when he is able to hunt, pays dear for
his meat, for he is stigmatized with the disgrace¬
ful epithet of poltroon or beggar.”

In the Caroline Isles, when an indigene sets out
on a journey, he carries with him no provisions.
When he is hungry he enters a lodge without any
kind of ceremony, and without waiting for per¬
mission he plunges his hand into the tub contain¬
ing the popoi (a paste of the fruit of the bread
tree) and when his hunger is satisfied he departs
without so much as thanking anybody. He has
(^utexercise3^aTigfiE\

"TTieie communistic habits, which had once been
general, were maintained in Lacedaemonia long
after the Spartans had issued out of barbarism ;
private property in objects of personal appropria¬
tion was extremely vague and precarious. Plu¬
tarch says that Lycurgus, the mythical personage
to whom the Spartans refer all their institutions,
forbade the closing of the house doors in order
that everybody might walk in and help himself to
the food and utensils he wanted, even in the ab¬
sence of the owner: a citizen of Sparta was en¬
titled, without permission, to ride the horses, use
the dogs, and even dispose of the slaves of any
other Spartan.

Very gradually did the idea of private prop¬
erty, which is so ingrained in, and appears so

32

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

natural to, the philistine, dawn upon the human
mind. The earliest reflections of man, on the con¬
trary, led him to think that all things should be
common to all. “The Indians,” says Hecke-
welder, “think that the Great Spirit has made
the earth, and all that it contains, for the common
good of mankind ; when he stocked the country
and gave them plenty of game, it was not for the
good of a few, but of all. Everything is given in
common to the sons of men. Whatever liveth on
the land, whatever groweth out of the earth, and
all that is in the rivers and waters, was given
jointly to all, and every one is entitled to his
share. Hospitality with them is not a virtue,

but a strict duty . They would lie

down on an empty stomach rather than have it
laid to their charge that they had neglected their
duty by not satisfying the wants of the stranger,

the sick, or the needy . because

they have a common right to be helped out of the
common stock ; for if the meat they have been
served with was taken from the wood, it was
common to all before the hunter took it ; if corn
and vegetables, it had grown out of the common
ground, yet not by the power of man, but by that
of the Great Spirit.”*

Caesar, who had observed an analogous com¬
munism among the Germans who had invaded
Belgium and Gaul, states that one of the objects

•Hobbes, one of the great thinkers of modern times, thought not
otherwise. “Nature hath given to each of us an equal right to all
things,” says Hobbes in “De Cive.” “In a state of nature every
man has a right to do and to take whatsoever he pleases : whence
the common saying that Nature has given all things to all men, and
whence it follows that In a state of nature utility is the rule of
right.”

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

33

of their customs was “to uphold in the people the
sense of equality, since every man sees his re¬
sources equal to those of the most powerful.”
And, in effect, this communism in production and
consumption presupposes a perfect equality
among all the members of the clan and tribe who
consider themselves as derived from a common
stock. But not only did this rudimentary com¬
munism maintain equality; it developed, also,
sentiments of fraternity and liberality which put
to shame the much vaunted brotherliness and
charity of the Christian, and which have elicited
the admiration of the observers of savage tribes
before they had been deteriorated by the Bible
and brandy, the brutal mercantilism, and pesti¬
lential diseases of civilization.

At no subsequent period of human develop¬
ment has hospitality been practiced in so simple
and perfect a way. “If a man entered an Iro¬
quois house,” says Morgan, “whether a villager,
a tribesman, or a stranger, and at whatever hour
of the day, it was the duty of the women of the
house to set food before him. An omission to do
this would have been a discourtesy amounting to
an affront. If hungry, he eats, if not hungry,
courtesy required he should taste the food and
thank the giver.”

“To be narrow-hearted, especially to those in
want, or to any of their own family, is accounted
a great crime, and to reflect scandal on the rest
of the tribe,” says another student of the primitive
manners of the American Indians.* A guest was

•James Adair. “History o f the American Indians.” London,
1775.

34

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

held sacred, even though an enemy. Tacitus
describes the same usages among the barbarian
Germans who invaded the Roman Empire. “No
people,” he says, “are more addicted to social
entertainments, or more liberal in the exercise of
hospitality. To refuse any person whatever ad¬
mittance under their roof is accounted flagitious.
Everyone according to his ability feasts his guest ;
when his provisions are exhausted, he who was
late the host is now the guide and companion to
another hospitable board. They enter the next
house, and are received with equal cordiality.
No one makes a distinction with respect to the
rights of hospitality between a stranger and an
acquaintance.”

Tacitus held up the barbarian Germans as an
example to his civilized compatriots. Catlin, who,
during a period of eight years, from 1832 to 1839,
sojourned amongst the wildest Indian tribes of
North America, writes: “Morality and virtue, I
venture to say, the civilized world need not
undertake to teach them.”

Travelers, who were not ferocious and rapa¬
cious commercial travelers like Mr. Stanley, have
not hesitated to bear testimony, with Caesar, to
the virtues of the savages, and to attribute those
virtues to the communism in which they lived.
“The brotherly sentiments of the Redskins,” says
the Jesuit Charlevoix, “are doubtless in part as-
cribable to the fact that the words mine and thine,
‘those cold words/ as St. John Chrysostomos calls
them, are all unknown as yet to the savages. The
protection they extend to the orphans, the widows
and the infirm, the hospitality which they exercise

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

35

in so admirable a manner, are, in their eyes, but
a consequence of the conviction which they hold
that all things should be common to all men.”*
So writes the Jesuit Charlevoix. Let us hear
what his contemporary and critic, the free-thinker
Lahontan, says : “Savages do not distinguish be¬
tween mine and thine, for it may be affirmed that
what belongs to the one belongs to the other. It
is only among the Christian savages who dwell at
the gates of our cities that money is in use. The
others will neither handle it nor even look upon it.
They call it : the serpent of the white men. They
think it strange that some should possess more
than others, and that those who have most should
be more highly esteemed than those who have
least. They neither quarrel nor fight among
themselves ; they neither rob nor speak ill of one
another.”t

II

So long as the savage hordes, composed of 30
or 40 members, are nomadic, they wander, on the
face of the earth, and. fix wherever they find the
means of sustenance, it isTprobablyTinlolIow-
ing the sea-shores and the course of the rivers
which supplied them with food that the savages
peopled the continents. Such was the opinion of
Morgan. The Bushmen and the Veddahs of
Ceylon, who live in this state of savagery, do not
dream of vindicating the right of property even

•Charlevoix. “Histoire de la Nouvelle France.”
t“Voyage de Lahontan,” II.

36

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

in the territories of the chase — the most archaic
form of landed property.

Primitive man, who does not till the soil, and
who supports himself by hunting and fishing, and
lives on a diet of wild fruits, eked out by milk,
must have access to vast territories for his own
sustenance and that of his herds : it has been com¬
puted, I know not with what accuracy, that each
savage, for his subsistence, requires three square
miles of land. Hence, when a country begins to
be populous, it becomes necesgaryytoaiyide the
Tandamong the t rib ess

~~~The earliest distribution of the_iand was into
pasture andHerritories of chase common , to the
' tribe, for the idea of individual ownership of the
lancj is of ulterior ~and~tardier growth. "The
earth is like fire arid water, that carifiot be sold,”
say the Omahas. The Maoris are so far from
conceiving that the land is vendible, that, “al¬
though the whole tribe might have consented to
a sale, they would still claim with every new-born
child among them an additional payment, on the
ground that they had only parted with their own
rights, and could not sell those of the unborn.
The government of New Zealand could settle the
difficulty only by buying land for a tribal annuity,
in which every child that is born acquired a
share.” Among the Jews and Semitic peoples
there was no private property in land. “The
land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is
mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with
me.” (Leviticus xxv., 23.) Christians set the
commandment of their God at defiance. Full of
reverence as they are for Jehovah and His laws,

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

37

still greater is their veneration for almighty
Capital. 8 J

Mankind underwent a long and painful process
of development before arriving at private prop¬
erty in land.

Among the Fuegians vast tracts of unoccupied
land circumscribe the territories of chase belong¬
ing to the tribe. Caesar relates that the Suevi and
Germans founded their pride upon having vast
solitudes round their frontiers. ( Dc Bello Gallico
iv., 3. ) Savage and barbarian peoples limit their
territories^ by neutraT" zones, because an~aTip~n
TounTupon thelands of any tribe is hunted like
a wildbeast, and mutilated or put to death if
takem AHeckewelder reports that the Redskins
cut off the noses and ears of every individual
found on their territory, and sent him back to
inform his chief that on the next occasion they
would scalp him. The feudal saying, Qui terre a,
guerre a, held good in primitive times ; the viola¬
tions of the territories of chase are among the
chief causes of dispute and warfare between
neighboring tribes. The unoccupied areas, es¬
tablished to prevent incursions, came, at a later
period, to serve as market places where the tribes
met to exchange their belongings. Harold, in
1063, defeated the Cambrians, who made per¬
petual inroads on the territories of the Saxons ;
he made a covenant with them that every man of
their nation found in arms east of the intrench-
ment of Offa should have his right hand cut off.
The Saxons, on their side, raised parrallel
trenches, and the space enclosed by the two walls
became neutral ground for the merchants of both
nations.

38

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

Anthropologists have noted with a feeling of
surprise that the sexes among savage peoples are
isolated and live apart; there is reason for sup¬
posing that this separation of the sexes was intro¬
duced when it was sought to put a stop to the
primitive promiscuity and prevent the sexual in¬
tercourse that was the rule between brother and
sister. This separation of the sexes within the
limits of the tribe, necessary in the interests of
morality, was upheld and promoted by a differen¬
tiation of pursuits and by property. The man is
habitually charged with the defense and the
procuring of food, while on the woman devolves
the culinary preparation of the food, the fabrica¬
tion of the clothes or household utensils, and the
management of the house once it has sprung into
existence.* It is, as Marx observes, the division
of labor which begins and which is based on sex :
property, in its origin, was confined to a single
sex.

The man is__a_hunter ajicL a warrior : he pos¬
sesses the horses and arms ; to the woman belong
the household utensils and other objects appro¬
priate to her pursuits ; these belongings she is
obliged to transport on her head or back, in the
same way that she carries her child, which belongs
to her and not to the father, generally unknown.

The introduction of agriculture enhanced the
separation of the sexes, while it was the determin¬
ant cause of the parcelling of the lands, the com¬
mon property of the tribe. The man continues a
warrior and a hunter ; he resigns to his wife the

*“A man,” said a Kuraai to Fison, “hunts, fishes, fights, and
sits down,” meaning that all besides is the business of the woman.

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

39

labor of the fields consenting, on occasion, to as¬
sist at harvest time; among pastoral peoples he
reserves to himself the care of the flocks and
herds, . which comes to be looked on as a nobler
pursuit than agriculture; it is, in truth, the less
arduous of the two. The Kaffirs consider the
tending of the herds as an aristocratic occupa¬
tion; they call the cow the black pearl. The
earliest laws of the Aryans forbade agriculture,
thought degrading, to the two highest classes, the
Brahmins and the Kshattryas, or warriors. “For
a Brahmin and a Kshattryas agriculture is blamed
rtuousTas ‘tlTe^plougtl with the iron point
in j ureslhe eartli AndThe beiilgs ifrTt.'’^ ^ -

ATTheTfslT oT a "thing consTiTufeT f he sole con¬
dition of its ownership, landed property, on its t-
first establishment among primitive nations, was ^
allotted to the women. In all societies in which
the matriarchal form of the family has maintained
itself, we find landed property held by the woman ;
such was the case among the Egyptians, the
Nairs, the Touaregs of the African desert, and
the Basques of the Pyrenees ; in the time of Ar¬
istotle two-thirds of the territory of Sparta be¬
longed to the women.

Landed property, which was ultimately to con¬
stitute for its owner a means of emancipation and ^
of social supremacy, was, at its origin, a cause of
subjection; the women were condemned to the
rude labor of the fields, from which they were
emancipated only by the introduction of servile
labor.

•Laws of Manu. Cap. x.

40

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

Agriculture, which led to private property in
land, introduced the servile labor, which in the
course of centuries has borne the names of slave-
labor, bond-labor, and wage-labor.

Ill

So long as primitive communism subsists, the
tribal lands are cultivated in common. “In cer¬
tain parts of India,” says Nearchus, one of Alex¬
ander’s generals, and eye-witness of events that
took place in the 4th century, b. c., “the lands
were cultivated in common by tribes or groups
of relatives, who at the end of the year shared
among themselves the fruits and crops.”*

Stephen cites a settlement of Maya Indians
composed of 100 laborers, “in which the lands are
held and wrought in common and products shared
by all ”t

From Tao, an Indian village of New Mexico,
Mr. Miller, in Dec. 1877, wrote to Morgan :
“There is a cornfield at each pueblo, cultivated by
all in common, and when the grain is scarce the
poor take from this store after it is housed, and
it is in the charge and at the disposal of the
Cacique, called the Governor.” In Peru, prior to
the Spanish Conquest, agricultural labor pos¬
sessed the attraction of a feast. At break of day,
from an eminence, or a tower, the whole of the
population was convoked — men, women, and
children, who all assembled in holiday attire and
adorned with their most precious ornaments. The

•Nearchus apud Strabo, lib xv.

t Stephen. * ‘Incidents of a trayel in Yucatan,* ‘ II.

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

41

crowd set to work, and sang in chorus hymns
celebrating the prowess of the Incas. The work
was accomplished with the utmost spirit and en¬
thusiasm.* Caesar relates that the Suevi, the
most warlike and most powerful of the Germanic
tribes, annually sent forth to combat a hundred
men from a hundred cantons. The men that
stayed at home were bound to maintain the men
engaged in the expedition ; the following year jt
was the combatants who remained at home and
the others who took up arms ; in this way, he
adds, the fields were always cultivated and the
men practiced in war. ( De Bello Gallico, IV. 1.)

The Scandinavians who ravaged Europe had
similar communistic practices, combined with
warlike expeditions ; the latter over, they returned
home to assist their wives in gathering in the
harvest. This cultivation in common long sur¬
vived the status of primitive communism. In the
Russian villages which are under the regime of
collective or consanguine property, a certain
tract of land is often cultivated in common and is
called mirskia zapaschki (fields tilled by the mir) ;
the produce of the harvest is distributed among
the families of the village. In other places the
arable lands are tilled jointly, and are afterwards
allotted to the families. In several communities
of the Don the meadows elsewhere portioned out
remain undivided, the mowing is performed in
common, and it is only after the hay is made that
the partition takes place. Forests, also, are
cleared in common. The co-operative plowing

•W. Prescott. “Conquest of Peru.”

42

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

and digging practiced in the village communi¬
ties ought probably to be referred to the period
of communist agriculture. In Fiji, when pre¬
paring a piece of ground, a number of men are
employed, divided into groups of three or four.
Each man being furnished with a digging stick,
they drive them into the ground so as to enclose
a circle of about two feet in diameter. When
by repeated strokes the sticks reach the depth of
18 inches, they are used as levers, and the mass
of soil between them is then loosened and raised.
Mr. Gomme cites, after Ure, an analogous prac¬
tice of the Scotch highlanders.

Caesar shows us how the Germans set out an¬
nually on predatory expeditions ; the booty was,
probably, divided among all the warriors, includ¬
ing those who had remained at home to perform
the agricultural labor of the community. The
Greeks of prehistoric times, also, were audacious
pirates, who scoured the Mediterranean and fled
with their booty to their citadels, perched on the
tops of promontories like eagles’ nests, and as
inexpugnable as the round towers of the Scan¬
dinavians, built in the midst of the waters. A
precious fragment of a Greek song, the Skolion
of Hybrias, presents us with a picture of the
heroic lives of the Greeks. The hero says: — “I
have for riches a great lance, and my sword, and
my buckler, the rampart of my body ; with these
I till the ground and reap the harvest and vin¬
tage the sweet juice of the grape; thanks to
these I am styled the master of the mnoia (the
slaves of the community). Let those who dare
not bear the lance and the buckler kneel to me

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

43

as to a master and call me the great king.”
Piracy is the favorite pursuit of prehistoric
times. Nestor inquires of Telemachus, his guest,
if. he is a pirate (Odyssey III). Solon main¬
tained a college of pirates at Athens (Institutes
of Gaius), and Thucydides states that in ancient
times piracy was honorable (I., sec. 5).

Wherever the heroes landed, they carried off
men, women, cattle, crops, and movables ; the
men became slaves and common property ; they
were placed under the supervision of the women,
and cultivated the lands for the warriors of the
clan. All of the cities of Crete, one of the first
islands colonized by these bold pirates, possessed,
down to the time of Aristotle, troops of slaves,
called mnotie, who cultivated the public do¬
mains. The Greek cities maintained, besides a
public domain, public slaves, and upheld common
repasts similar to those described by Heraclides.*

Mr. Hodgson, in 1830, described a village,
thirty miles northwest of Madras, the inhabitants
of which were assisted in their agricultural op¬
erations by slaves who were common property ;
for they were transferred with the other priv¬
ileges of the village occupants when those priv¬
ileges were sold or mortgaged. The mediaeval
towns and even villages had serfs in common. t
/ Thus we see that everywhere property in land
and its produce, in domestic animals, serfs and

•The Greek slaves were divided into two classes, the pnblic
slaves ( Koine douleia) belonging to the state, and the slaves be¬
longing to private individuals, called Klerotes, 1. e., adjudged by lot.
Athens possessed a number of public slaves, who did not cultivate
the soil, but discharged the functions of executioner, police agents,
and Inferior employes of the administration.

■(•Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1830, vol. 11.

44

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM

slaves, was primarily property common to all the
members of the clan. Communism was the cradle
of humanity; the work of civilization has been
to destroy this primitive communism, of which
the last vestiges that remain, in defiance of the
rapacity of the aristocrat and the bourgeois, are
the communal lands. But the work of civiliza¬
tion is twofold : while on the one hand it destroys,
on the other hand it reconstructs ; while it broke
into pieces the communist mould of primitive
humanity, it was building up the elements of a
higher and more complex form of communism.
I am here concerned to trace out civilization in
its double movement of destruction and recon¬
struction.

CHAPTER III

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

I

The common tribal property began to break
up as the family was being constituted. A few
remarks respecting the family will render an ex¬
position of the evolution of property more in¬
telligible to the reader.

We are at present aware that the human
species, before arriving at the patriarchal form
of the family, in which the father is the head,
possesses the estates and transmits his name to
all his children, passed through the matriarchal
form, in which the mother occupied that high_po-
sjtion._ We have seen, above, the whole clan liv¬
ing in great joint tenement houses, containing a
certain number of rooms for the married women.
The private family is then nascent ; when we find
it constituted in the matriarchal or patriarchal
form, a segmentation has ensued of the commu¬
nal house into as many private houses as there
are households. In the matriarchal family the
mother lives with her children and her younger
brothers and sisters ; receiving her husbands,
who belong to a different clan, each in his turn ;
it is then that family property makes it appear¬
ance.

Its beginnings were modest, for, at the outset,

45

46 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

it consisted but of the cabin and the small garden
surrounding it. Among certain people the patri¬
archal family may have been constituted and have
superseded the matriarchal family prior to the
constitution of family property, but the case
is not universal ; on the contrary it would seem
that the revolution in the family was posterior to
the formation of family property. Such was the
case with the Egyptians, Greeks, and many other
peoples the course of whose development was a
normal one, undisturbed by the invasion of na¬
tions on a higher plane of civilization.

So long as the matriarchal form subsists, the
movables and immovables are transmitted by the
women ; a person inherits from his mother and
not from his father, or the relations of his father.
In Java, where this form of the family reached
a high pitch of development, a man’s property
reverts to his mother’s family; he is not at lib¬
erty to make a donation to his children, who be¬
long to the clan of his wife, without the consent
and concurrence of his brothers and sisters. If
we judge from what we know of the Egyptians
and other peoples, the male occupied a very sub¬
ordinate position in the matriarchate. Among
the Basques, who have preserved their primitive
customs, notwithstanding Christianity and civ¬
ilization, when the eldest daughter, on her
mother’s death, becomes an heiress, she becomes
at the same time the mistress of her younger
brothers and sisters. The male is under the tute¬
lage of his own family, and when he “goes out”
to get married, with his sister’s approbation, he
falls under the dominion of his wife; he is sub-

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 47

jected throughout life to female authority, as
son, brother and husband ; he possesses nothing
save the small peculium which his sister gives
him on his marriage. “The husband,” says a
Basque proverb, “is his wife’s head servant.”

This elevated position of the woman affords a
proof, let me observe in passing, that the physical
and intellectual superiority of the male, far from
being a primordial physiological necessity, is but
the consequence of an economical situation, per¬
petuated during centuries, which allowed the
male a freer and fuller development than it per¬
mitted to the female, held in bondage by the
family. Broca, in the course of his discussion
with Gratiolet on the relation of the brain weight
and cranial, capacity to the, intelligence, conceded
that the inferiority^ of.. the-4emal£_jiiight Jbe_due
merely to an inferior education. M. Manouvrier,
a cfiscipTeof Broca^and Professor at the Paris
School of Anthropology, has demonstrated that
the cranial capacities of the males of the Stone
Age, which he had measured, were nearly as
great as the average cranial capacities of the
modern Parisians, whereas the cranial capacities
of the females of the Stone Age were consider¬
ably greater than those of the modern female
Parisians.*

Most disastrous has been the effect on the
human species of this female inferiority; it has

•The following are M. Manouvrler’s figures :

Average cranial capacity of modern Parisians.

Number of skulls Capacity in cubic

measured. centimeters.

77 male. 1560.

41 female. 1338.

48 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

been one of the most active causes of the de¬
generation of civilized nations.

Without going to the length of pretending
that in all countries the ascendancy of the female
assumed the proportions which it attained in
Egypt, it is an indubitable fact that wheresoever
we meet with the matriarchal family we can note
a dependency of the men upon the women, coin¬
ciding, frequently, with a degree of animosity
between the sexes, divided into two classes.
Among the Natchez and among all the nations
of the valley of the Mississippi, the term zvoman,
applied to a man, was an affront. Herodotus
relates that Sesostris, in order to perpetuate the
memory of his glorious achievements, erected
obelisks among the conquered nations, and that
to mark his contempt for those who had offered
him no resistance he caused the female sexual
organ to be engraved thereon, as emblematic of
their cowardice. To apply to a Homeric Greek
the epithet zvoman was a grave insult. On the
other hand, the warlike women of the tribes of
Dahomey employ the word man by way of an
injurious epithet. Unquestionably it was the
desire to shake off this feminine ascendancy and
to satisfy this feeling of animosity which led man
to wrest from woman the control of the family.

Average cranial capacity of men and women of the Stone Age.

Number of skulls

measured. Capacity.

58 male. 1544.

30 female. 1422.

Thus the average cranial capacity of the male savage is Inferior
by 26 cubic centimeters, whereas the average cranial capacity of
the female savage is superior by 84 c.c. — -L. Manouvrier. “De la
quantity’ de 1’encephale.” — Memoire de la SocigtS d' Anthropologic
de Paris, III. 2nd fascicule, 1885.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 49

Presumptively this family revolution was ac¬
complished when the movable goods of individ¬
ual property had multiplied; and when the fam¬
ily estate was constituted, and had been
consecrated by time and custom ; it was worth
the men’s while, for the nonce, to dethrone the
women. There took place a positive disposses¬
sion of the women by the men, accomplished with
more or less brutality, according to the nations ;
while in Lacedsemonia the women conserved a
measure of their former independence (a fact
which caused Aristotle to say that it was among
the most warlike peoples that the women exer¬
cised their greatest authority), at Athens, and
in the maritime cities engaged in commerce, they
were forcibly expropriated and despoiled. This
dispossession gave rise to heroic combats ; the
women took up arms in defence of their priv¬
ileges, and fought with such desperate energy
that the whole of Greek mythology and even
recorded history have preserved the memory of
their struggles.

So long as property was a cause of subjection,
it was abandoned to the women ; but no sooner
had it become a means of emancipation and su¬
premacy in the family and society than man
tore it from her.

Without entering more specially into the his¬
tory of its evolution, I would lay stress upon
this point, to-wit, that the family, wherever or
however constituted, whether affecting the matri¬
archal or patriarchal form, invariably breaks up
the communism of the clan or tribe. At first
the clan was the common family of all its mem-

50 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

bers ; afterwards there came to exist private
families, having interests distinct from those of
the clan considered as an aggregate of a number
of families; the communal territory of the tribe
was then parcelled out so as to form the collective
property * of each family.

The existent European family must not be con¬
sidered as the type of the family founded on
collective property. The family was not reduced
to its last and simplest expression, as it is in our
day, when it is composed of the three indispen¬
sable elements : the father, the mother, and the
children ; it consisted of the father, the recog¬
nized head of the family collectivity ; of his legiti¬
mate wife and his concubines, living under the
same roof ; of his children, his younger brothers,
with their wives and children, and his unmar¬
ried sisters : such a family comprised many mem¬
bers.

n

The arable lands, hitherto cultivated in com¬
mon by the entire clan, are divided into parcels
of different categories, accordtng^ to the qualify
of^ the soil'; the parcels are formed into lots, in
such wiseThat each lot contains an equal propor¬
tion of the different descriptions of soil ; the
number of lots corresponds to that of the fami-

•This form of property, under another name than that of col-
lective property, which term I employ in contradistinction to the
primitive communist form, has of recent years been the subject of
extensive research. It has been investigated in Germany by
Haxthausen, Maurer, Engels, etc. ; in England by Maine, Seebohm,
Gomme, etc. ; in Belgium by Laveleye ; in Russia by Schepotief ,
Kovalesky, etc.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 51

lies. A portion of the land is reserved in view
of a possible increase of the population ; it is let
on lease or cultivated in common. To preclude
injustice or grounds for complaint the shares
were drawn by lot ;* hence, in Greek and Latin,
the words which designate lot (sors, cleros) sig¬
nify also goods and patrimony.

If, when a family had complained of unfair¬
ness, they proved, on inquiry, that their complaint
was justified, satisfaction was granted them by
an additional allotment out of the reserve lands.
The inquirers who have had opportunities of
observing the way in which these partitions of
the land are practiced, have been struck by the
spirit of equality which presides over them, and
by the ability o f the peasant land surveyors.
Haxthausen relates how “Count de Kinsleff, the
minister of the imperial domains, had in several
localities of the government of Woronieje caused
the land to be valued and surveyed by land taxers
and land surveyors. The results went to show
that the measurements of the peasants were in
all respects, save for a few minor discrepancies,
in perfect consonance with the truth. Besides,
who knows which of the two were the more
accurate?”!

The pasture lands, forests, lakes, and ponds, the
right of hunting and fishing, and other rights,

•Dividing the land by lot has been everywhere the primitive
mode of distribution. “The Lord commanded the children of Israel,
entering the Land of Canaan, to divide the land by lot.” (Numbers
xxxlii., 54; xxxvi., 2.)

f “Etudes sur la situation intgrieure, la vie nationale et les insti¬
tutions de la Kussie,” par le Baron A. de Haxthausen. French edi¬
tion of 1847.

52 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

such as the imposts raised on the caravans, etc.,
are the joint property of all the members of the
clan.

The allotments are cultivated by each family
under the direction of its chief and the super¬
vision of the village council ; the crops are the
property of the family collectively, instead of be¬
longing, as at an earlier period, to the tribe or
clan. A family is not allowed to cultivate their
lot at pleasure, says Marshall. “They must sow
their fields with the same grain as that of the
other families of the community.”*

The system of cultivation is a triennial rota¬
tion: (1) corn or rye, (2) springs crops (barley,
oats, beans, peas, etc.), (3) fallow. Not only
the kind of seed to sow, but also the seed and
harvest times, are prescribed by the communal
council. Sir G. Campbell informs us that every
Indian village possesses its calendar — Brahmin,
or astrologist, whose buisness it is to indicate
the propitious seasons for seed time and harvest.
Haxthausen, an intelligent and impartial observer
of the manners of the collectivist communes of
Russia, remarks that “the most perfect order,
resembling a military discipline, presides over
the labors of the fields. On the same day, at the
same hour, the peasants repair to the fields, some
to plough, others to harrow, the ground, etc.,
and they all return in company. This orderliness
is not commanded by the Starosta, the village
ancient ; it is simply the result of that gregarious
disposition which distinguishes the Russian peo-

•Marshall. “Elementary and Practical Treatise on Landed Prop¬
arty.” London, 1804.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 53

pie, and that love of union and order which ani¬
mates the commune.” These characteristics,
which Haxthausen considers as peculiar to the
Russian people, are but an outgrowth of the col¬
lective form of property, and have been observed
in all parts of the world. We have seen that, to
determine the seed time, the Indians did not obey
human orders, but celestial considerations sug¬
gested by the astrologer. Maine, who in his
quality of jurisconsult of the Anglo-Indian gov¬
ernment, was in a position to closely study the
village communities, writes : —

“The council of the village elders does not
command anything, it merely declares what has
always been. Nor does it generally declare that
which it believes some higher power to have
commanded ; those most entitled to speak on the
subject deny that the natives of India necessarily
require Divine or political authority as the basis
of their usages ; their antiquity is by itself as¬
sumed to be a sufficient reason for obeying them.
Nor, in the sense of the analytical jurists, is there
right or duty in an Indian village community;
a person aggrieved complains not of an individ¬
ual wrong but of the disturbance of the order
of the entire little society.”*

The discipline referred to by Haxthausen is a
natural and spontaneous product, unlike the
movements of an army or the maneuvers of the
laborers on the bonanza farms of North Ameri¬
ca, which are produced to order. A Swiss cler¬
gyman, who wrote in the last century, teaches

*H. S. Maine. “Village Communities in the Bast and West,”

p. 68. '

54 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

us that in the canton of Berne there existed
the same orderliness and ardor in work ob¬
served in Russia. “On an appointed evening,”
he says, “the entire commune repairs to the
communal meadows, every commoner choosing
his own ground, and when the signal is given
at midnight, from the top of the hill downwards,
every man mows down the grass which stands
before him in a straight line, and all that which
he has cut till noon of the next day belongs to
him. The grass which remains standing after
the operation is trodden down and browsed by
the cattle which are turned on to it.”*

The crops once got in, the lands allotted to the
different families become common property
again, and the villagers are free to send their
cattle to depasture them.

Originally, the fathers of the families belong¬
ing to the clan, were alone entitled to a share in
these allotments. It is only at a later period that
the stranger settlers, having obtained the free¬
dom of the city after a term of residence, were
admitted to the partition of the land. Landed
property belonged to the fathers, whence patria,
fatherland ; in the Scandinavian laws, house and
fatherland were synonyms. At that time a man
possessed a patria and political rights only if
he had a right to a .share in the land. As a con¬
sequence, the fathers and males of the family
alone were charged with the country’s defense ;
they alone were privileged to bear arms. The

*“Essai sur l’abolitlon du parcours et sur le partage des Mens
eommunaux,” par Sprungli de Neuenegg ; public par la SocietS
D’Economie rurale de Berne (1763), cite par Neufcbateau, dans son
Voyage agronomique dans la Senatorerie de Dijon, 1806.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 55

progress of capitalism consists in confiding the
defense of the country to those who do not pos¬
sess an inch of land — who have no stake in the
country — and to accord political rights to men
who have no property.

Private property in land does not as yet ob¬
tain, because the land belongs to the entire vil¬
lage, and only the temporary usage of it is
granted, on condition that it shall be cultivated
according to the established customs, and under
the supervision of the village elders charged with
watching over the maintenance of those customs.
The house alone, with its small enclosure, is the
private property of the family ; among some peo¬
ples, e. g., the Neo-Caledonians, the tenement
was burnt on the death of the chief of the fam¬
ily, as well as his arms, his favorite animals, and,
occasionally, his slaves. According to all appear¬
ance, the house for a long time was distinguished
from the land, as a movable ; it is so qualified in
many customaries of France ; in that of Lille,
among others.

The house is inviolable ; nobody has a right to
enter it without the master’s consent. The jus¬
tice of the country was suspended at the thresh¬
old ; if a criminal had penetrated into the
house, nay, if he had but touched the door-latch,
he was secure from public prosecution and
amenable only to the authority of the father of
the family, who exercised the legislative and
executive power within the precincts of the
house. In 186 b. c., the Roman Senate having
condemned to death some Roman ladies, whose
orgies compromised public morals, was forced

56 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

to remit the execution of the sentence to the
heads of the families ; for the women, as con¬
stituting a part of the household, were answer-
able only to the master of it. To such extremes
was this inviolability pushed in Rome that a
father could not invoke the assistance of the
magistrates or public force in case of his son’s
resistance. In the Middle Ages this sanctity of
the domicile still existed ; at Mulhouse, for ex¬
ample, a burgher shut up in his house ceased to
be amenable to the justice of the town ; the court
was bound to transport itself to his house door
in order to judge him, and it was open to him
to reply to the questions put to him from the
window. The right of asylum possessed by the
Church was merely a transformation of this
sanctity of the house ; as we shall see hereafter,
the Church was but a sort of communal house.

The habitations are not contiguous, but sur¬
rounded by a strip of territory. Tacitus, and
numerous writers after him, have assumed that
this insulation of the houses was prescribed as
a measure of precaution against fire, so danger¬
ous in villages in which the houses are built of
wood and thatched with straw. I am of belief
that the reason for this very prevalent custom
should be looked for elsewhere. It has been
shown that the tribal territories were surrounded
by a strip of uncultivated land, which served to
mark the boundaries of other neighboring tribes ;
in like manner the family dwelling is surrounded
by a piece of unoccupied land in order to render
it independent of the adjacent dwelling houses;
this was the sole land which, subsequently, it was

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 57

permitted to enclose with palisades, walls, or
hedges. In the barbarian codes it is known by
the name of legal, legitimate court ( curtis legalis,
hoba legitima ) ; in this spot was placed the fam¬
ily tomb. So indispensable was this insulation
held to be that the Roman law of the Twelve
Tables fixed the space to intervene the town
houses at two-and-a-half feet.*

It was not the houses only, but also the family
allotments of land which were isolated, so that
the fear of fire could not have suggested the
measure. A law of the Twelve Tables regulates
that a strip of land, five feet in width, be left
uncultivated. (Tablet VII., sec. 4.)

The breaking up of the common property of
the clan into the collective property of the fami¬
lies of the clan was a more radical innovation
than, in our day, would be a restitution of the
landed estates to the community. Collective
property was introduced with infinite difficulty,
and only maintained itself by placing itself under
Divine protection and the aegis of the law. I
may add that the law was only invented for the
purpose of protecting it. The justice which is
other than the satisfaction of revenge, an eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth — the lex talionis —
made its appearance in human society only after
the establishment of property, for, as Locke says,
“Where there is no property there is no injustice,
is a proposition as certain as any demonstrated
in Euclid. For the idea of property being a right
to anything, and the idea to which the name in¬
justice is given being the invasion or violation

•Table VII., sec. 1. Restored text after Festus.

58 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

of that right.”* As the witty Linguet said to
Montesquieu, “L’esprit des lois, c’est l’esprit de
la propriete.”

Religious rites and ceremonies were instituted
to impress upon the superstitious minds of primi¬
tive peoples the respect due to this private prop¬
erty of the family collectively, so greatly opposed
to their communistic usages. In Greece and
Italy, on appointed days of the month and year,
the chief of the family walked round his fields,
along the uncultivated boundary, pushing the
victims before him, singing hymns, and offering
up sacrifices to the posts or stones, the metes and
bounds of the fields, which were converted into
divinities — they were the Termini of the Ro¬
mans, the “divine bournes” of the Greeks. The
cultivator was not to approach the landmark,
“lest the divinity, on feeling himself struck by
the plowshare, should cry out to him, ‘Stop, this
is my field, yonder is thine.’ ” The Bible
abounds in recommendations to respect the fields
of one’s neighbor : “Thou shalt not remove thy
neighbor’s landmark.” (Deut. xix., 14.)
“Cursed be he that removeth his neighbor’s
landmark.” Job, who has the soul of a land¬
lord, numbers among the wickedest the man
“who removes the landmark.” (Job xxiv.) The
Cossacks, with a view to inculcating on their
children a respect for other people’s property,
took them out for walks along the boundaries
of the fields, whipping them all the way with
rods. Plato, who drops his idealism when he

•Locke’s “Essay on the Human Understanding.” Book IV.,
chap, iii., sec. 18.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 59

deals with property, says, “Our first law must be
that no man shall lay a hand on the boundary-
mark which divides a field from his neighbor’s
field, for it must remain unmoved. Let no man
remove the stone which he has sworn to leave
in its place.” (Laws, VIII.) The Etruscans
called down maledictions on the heads of the
guilty : “He who has touched or removed the
landmark shall be condemned by the gods ; his
house shall disappear ; his race become extinct ;
his lands shall cease to bear fruit ; hail, rust, and
canicular heat shall destroy his harvests ; the
limbs of the culprit shall ulcerate and rot.”*

The spiritual chastisements, which make so
deep an impression on the wild and fiery imagina¬
tions of primitive peoples, having proved inade¬
quate, it became necessary to resort to corporal
punishments of unexampled severity — punish¬
ments repugnant to the feelings of barbarian peo¬
ples. Savages inflict the most cruel tortures on
themselves by way of preparing for a life of per¬
petual struggle, but such tortures are never puni¬
tive ; it is the civilized proprietor who has hit
upon the bene amat, bene castigat of the Bible.
Catlin, who knew the savages of America well,
states that a Sioux chief had expressed his sur¬
prise to him at having seen “along the frontier
white men whip their children; a thing that is
very cruel.”

The worst crime that a barbarian can commit
is to shed the blood of his clan; if he kills one
of its members the entire clan must rise up to
take vengeance on him. When a member of a

♦Sacred formula cited by Fustel de Coulanges. Cite Antique.

60 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

clan was found guilty of murder or any other
crime he was expelled, and devoted to the in¬
fernal gods, lest any should have to reproach
himself with having spilt the blood of his clan
by killing the murderer. Property marks its
appearance by teaching the barbarian to trample
under foot such pious sentiments ; laws are en¬
acted condemning to death all those who attack
property. “Whosoever,” decrees the law of the
Twelve Tables, “shall in the night furtively have
cut, or caused to graze on, the crops yielded by
the plow, shall, if he has reached puberty, be
devoted to Ceres and put to death ; if he has not
arrived at puberty he shall be beaten with rods
at the will of the magistrate and condemned to
repair the damage doubly. The manifest thief
(i. e., taken in the act), if a freeman, shall be
scourged with rods and delivered up to slavery.
The incendiary of a corn-stack shall be whipped
and put to death by fire.” (Table VIII., secs. 9,
10, 14.) The Saxons punished theft with death.
The Burgundian law surpassed the Roman law
in cruelty ; it condemned to slavery the wives
and children under 14 years of age who had not
denounced their husbands and fathers guilty of
stealing a horse or an ox. (XLVII., sec. 1, 2.)
Property introduced the common informer into
the family.

These moral and material punishments, which
are met with in all countries and which are
everywhere alike ferocious,* abundantly prove

•Property is Invariably ferocious ; until quite recently thieve*
were hanged after having suffered torture ; the forgers of banknote*
in civilized Europe were formerly sentenced to death, and are still
condemned to hard labor for life.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 61

the difficulty experienced by the collective form
of property in introducing itself into the com¬
munist tribes.

Prior to the institution of collective property,
the barbarian looked upon all the property be¬
longing to the tribe as his own, and disposed of
it accordingly ; the Lacedaemonian, we have seen,
had the right to enter private dwellings without
any formalities and to take the food he required.
The Lacedaemonians were, it is true, a compara¬
tively civilized people, but their essentially war¬
like existence had enabled them to preserve their
ancient usages. The travelers who have fallen
victims to this propensity of the barbarian to
appropriate everything within his reach, have
described him as a thief; as if theft were com¬
patible with a state of society in which private
property is not as yet constituted. But as soon
as collective property was established, the natural
habit of appropriating what a man sees and cov¬
ets, became a crime when practiced at the ex¬
pense of the private property of the family, and,
in order to set a restraint upon this inveterate
habit, it was found necessary to have recourse
to moral and physical punishment; justice and
our odious criminal codes followed in the wake
of collective property and are an outgrowth of it.

Collective property, if not the sole cause, was,
at all events, the pre-eminent cause of the over¬
throw of the matriarchate by the patriarchate.
The fate of the patriarchal family is intimately
bound up with the collective form of property:
the latter becomes the essential condition of its
maintenance, and, so soon as it begins to break

62 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

up, the patriarchal family is likewise disinte¬
grated and superseded by the modern family; a
sorry remnant, destined, ere long, to disappear.

Ancient society recognized the necessity of the
integrity of collective property for the mainte¬
nance of the family. At Athens the State
watched over its proper administration ; anybody
being entitled to demand the indictment of the
head of a family who maladministered his goods.
The collective property did not belong to the
father, nor even to the individual members of
the family, but to the family considered as a
collective entity which is perpetual, and endures
from generation to generation.* The property
belonged to the family in the past, present, and
future; to the ancestors who had their altars
and their tombs in it ; to the living members who
were only usufructuaries, charged with continu¬
ing the family traditions, and with nursing the
property in order to hand it down to their de¬
scendants. The chief of the family, who might
be the father, the eldest brother, the younger
brother, or, on occasions, the mother, was the
administrator of the estate ; it was his duty to
attend to the wants of the individuals who com¬
posed the collectivity ; to see that the lands were
properly cultivated and the house kept in order,
so that he might transmit the patrimony to his
successor in the same state of prosperity in which
he had received it at the death of his predecessor.
To enable him to fulfill this mission the head of

•Among the Germans and the Bavarians they were known by the
name of estates belonging to the genealogies (genealogiae) ; among
the Ripuarian Franks under that of terrae aviatigae ; among the
Anglo-Saions under that of ethel or alod parentum.

FAMILY OR CONSANCUINE COLLECTIVISM 63

the family was armed with despotic power; he
was judge and executioner; he judged, con¬
demned, and inflicted bodily punishment on the
members of the family under his control; his
authority stretched so far as to empower him to
sell his children into slave y, and to inflict the
pain of death on all his suoordinates, including
his wife, although she enjoyed the protection,
sufficiently precarious, it is true, of her own
family. The quantity of land distributed was
generally proportionate to the number of males
in the family ; the father, with a view to the pro¬
curing of servants to cultivate it, married his
sons while still in infancy to adult women, who
became his concubines. Haxthausen relates that
in Russia one could see tall and robust young
women carrying their little husbands in their
arms.

The worn-out phrase “The family is the pillar
of the state,” which modern moralists and poli¬
ticians reiterate ad nauseam since it has ceased
to be exact, was at one time an adequate expres¬
sion of the truth. Where collective property
exists, every village is a petty state, the govern¬
ment whereof is constituted by the council
elected in the assembly of the family-chiefs, co-
equals in rights and privileges. In India, where
the collective form of property was highly de¬
veloped, the village had its public officers, who
where artisans (wheelwrights, tailors, weavers,
etc.), schoolmasters, pirests, and dancing women
for public ceremonies ; they were paid by the vil¬
lage community, and owed their services to the
members having ancestral shares in the land, but

64 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

not to stranger settlers. In the Greek republics
the state maintained public prostitutes for the
use of the males of the patrician families. Sir
G. Campbell states, among other curious facts,
that the smith and the artisans generally, were
more highly remuneiated in the Indian villages
than the priests.

The head man of the village, elected for his
ability, his learning, and powers as a scorcerer,
is the administrator of the property of the com¬
munity ; he alone is privileged to carry on com¬
merce with the exterior, that is, to sell the sur¬
plus of the crops and cattle, and to buy such
objects as are not manufactured in the village. As
Haxthausen observes : “Commerce is only car¬
ried on wholesale, which is of great advantage
to the peasant, who, left to himself, is often un¬
der the necessity of selling his products below
their real value, and at unfavorable moments.
As commerce is in the hands of the chief, the
latter is able from his connections with the chiefs
of the neighboring villages to wait for a rise in
prices, and take advantage of all favorable cir¬
cumstances before concluding a sale.” All those
who are familiar with the deceptions practiced
upon peasants by merchants will appreciate the
justness of the observation of Haxthausen. The
French bourgeois, who pounced upon Algiers and
Tunis as on a prey, expressed great moral indig¬
nation at being prevented from entering into
communication with the Arabs individually, and
obliged to treat with the chiefs of the commu¬
nity ; they loudly and pathetically bewailed the
unhappy lot of the wretched Arabs bereft of the

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 65

liberty of allowing themselves to be fleeced by
the European merchants !

Petty societies, organized on the basis of col¬
lective property, are endowed with a vitality and
power of resistance possessed by no other social
form in an equal degree.

“The village communities are little republics,
having nearly everything that they want within
themselves and almost independent of any for¬
eign relations,” says Lord Metcalfe. “They
seem to last where nothing else lasts. Dynasty
after dynasty tumbles down, revolution succeeds
to revolution ; Hindu, Pagan, Mogul, Mahratta,
Sikh, English are all masters in turn ; but the
village communities remain the same. In time of
trouble they arm and fortify themselves ; a hos¬
tile army passes through the country, the village
communities collect their cattle within their walls
and let the enemy pass unmolested. If plunder
and devastation be directed against themselves,
and the force employed be irresistible, they flee
to friendly villages at a distance ; but when the
storm has passed over they return and resume
their occupations. If a country remains for a
series of years the scene of continued pillage and
massacre, so that the village cannot be inhabited,
the scattered villagers nevertheless return when¬
ever the power of peaceable possession revives. A
generation may pass away, but the succeeding
generation will return. The sons will take the
places of their fathers, the same site for the vil¬
lage, the same positions for their houses; the
same lands will be reoccupied by the descendants.

It is not a trifling matter that will turn

66 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

them out, for they will often maintain their posts
throughout times of disturbance and convulsions,
and acquire a strength sufficient to resist pillage
and oppression with success.” Farther on he
adds : “The village constitution which can sur¬
vive all outward shock is, I suspect, easily sub¬
verted with the aid of our regulations and Courts
of Justice by any internal disturbance ; litigation,
above all things, I should think would tend to
destroy it.”*

* Report of Select Committee of the House of Commons, 1832.
The remarkable deposition of Lord Metcalfe is published in extenso
in the appendix to Vol. XI.

Jurists, politicians, religious and socialist reformers have repeat¬
edly discussed the rights of property, and these discussions, how inter¬
minable soever, have always come back to the Initial point, to-wit,
that property had been established by violence, but that time,
which disfigures all things, had added grace and sanctity to prop¬
erty. Until recent years the writers of philosophies of human
society ignored the existence of collective property. Baron Hax-
thausen, who traveled in Russia in 1840, made the discovery, and
published an acoeunt of it in his “Etudes sur la situation inter! -
eure, la vie nationale et les institutions rurales de la Russie.” He
remarked that the mir was the realization of the Utopianism of St.
Simon, then in vogue. Bakounine and the liberal Russians, who
had never so much as suspected the existence of collective property
in Russia, now re-discovered Haxthausen’s discovery ; and as, in
despite of their amorphous anarchism, they are above all things
Russian Jingoes, who imagine that the Slav race is the chosen race,
privileged to guide mankind, they declared the mir, that primitive
and exhausted form of property, to be the form of the future ; it
only remained for the western nations to obliterate their civilization
and to ape that of the Russian peasants.

In virtue of the principle that it is hardest to see what lies
under our eyes, Haxthausen, who had discovered the mir in Russia,
was unable to perceive the remains of the Hark, so numerous in
Germany ; he affirmed that collective property was a specialty of the
Slavs. Maurer has the merit of having demonstrated that the
Germans have passed through the stage of collective property; and.
since Maurer, traces of it have been found in all countries and
among all races. Before Haxthausen, the English officials in India
had, indeed, called attention to this particular form of property in
the provinces which they administered, but their discovery, buried
in official reports, had obtained no publicity; but since the question
has come under scientific observation it has been found that this
same form had already been signalized by writers in the last, and in
the first years of the present, centuries, notably by Le Grand
d’Aussy, Francois de Neufchateau, in France, and the agronomist
Marshall, in England.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 67

Bourgeois exploitation cannot tolerate, along¬
side of it, the collective form of property, which
it destroys and replaces by private property, the
adequate form of bourgeois property. What has
taken place in India and Algeria has occurred in
France. The village collectivities that had lasted
throughout the entire feudal period, and sur¬
vived till 1789, were disorganized by the dis¬
solvent action of the laws during and after the
bourgeois revolution. The great revolutionary
jurist, Merlin suspect (so called because he had
been the proposer of the sanguinary loi des sus¬
pects) did more towards bringing about the de¬
struction and confiscation of the communal lands
of the village collectivities than the feudal lords
had done in the course of centuries.

Over and above the reasons of a political char¬
acter which prompt monarchical governments to
patronize the family organization based on col¬
lective property, there exist yet others, equally
important, of an administrative character. As
the collectivist village forms a number of admin¬
istrative units represented by the chief who di¬
rects it and trafficks in its name, the Govern¬
ment makes the latter responsible for the levying
of the taxes and the recruiting of the militia, and
charges him with additional functions which are
not remunerated. In Russia the Imperial Gov¬
ernment lends its weight to the decisions of the
communal council, incorporating into the army,
and even despatching to Siberia, all those whose
conduct is not approved of by the elders. In
France, the monarchy anterior to 1789 exerted
itself to uphold these peasant collectivist organi-

68 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

zations, assailed on the one hand by the feudal
lords, who brutally despoiled them of their com¬
munal possessions and privileges, and on the
other by the bourgeoisie, who seized upon their
lands by every means.*

The feudal lords encouraged the organization
of the peasants into family collectivities. Dalloz
mentions a contract of the 17th century in which
a lord causes his lands to be cultivated by meta¬
yers, on condition that the peasants shall have
“in common, fire and food and live in perpetual
community.” A legist of the 18th century,
Dunod, furnishes us with the reason which led to
the community of the cultivators : It is that “the
seignorial domains are better cultivated, and the
subjects better able to pay the tributes due to the
lord when living in common than when forming
separate households.”

Collective property, which destroyed the primi¬
tive tribal communism, established the family
communism which secured all its members

•Russian revolutionary socialists believe in the mir, and are in
favor of its maintenance. They opine that tha existence of a class
of peasants living in collectivity must facilitate the establishment
of agrarian communism. A socialist government, turning to account
the communistic sentiments developed by collective property, might
conceivably adopt measures favorable to the nationalization of the
soil and its social cultivation ; but the establishment of a revolu¬
tionary socialist power in Russia is highly Improbable during the
maintenance, as a general fact, of this form of property. All vil¬
lage collectivities, organized on the basis of the mir, are indepen¬
dent; they are self-sufficing, and keep up very imperfect relations
among one another, and it is an easy matter for any government
to stifle whatever disposition they might manifest for federation.
This is what has come to pass in India. The English Government,
with an army of 50,000 European soldiers, holds in subjection an
empire as thickly peopled as Russia. The village collectivities
united by no federative bonds are powerless to offer any considerable
force of resistance. It may be asseverated that the surest basis of
governmental despotism is precisely collective property, with the
family and communal organization which corresponds thereto.

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 69

against want. “The proletariat is not known in
Russia,” wrote Haxthausen, “and so long as this
institution (the mir ) survives, it can never be
found here. A man may become impoverished
here and squander his substance, but the faults
or misfortunes of the father can never affect his
children, for these holding their rights of the
commune, and not of the family, do not inherit
their father’s poverty.”

It is precisely this security against want af¬
forded by collective property which is offensive
to the capitalist, whose whole fortune reposes
on the misery of the working class.

Collective property is remarkable not only for
the tenacity and indestructibility of the small
peasant collectivities which it maintained, and
the well-being which it afforded to the cultivators
of the soil, but also for the grandeur of its
achievements. In illustration whereof let me cite
the marvellous works of irrigation in India and
the terrace-culture of the mountain slopes of
Java, covering, Wallace informs us, hundreds of
square miles; “these terraces are increased year
by year, as the population increases, by the in¬
habitants of each village working in concert un¬
der the direction of their chiefs, and it is, per¬
haps, by this system of village culture alone that
such extensive terracing and irrigation has been
rendered possible.”*

The collective form of property, traces of
which have been met with wherever researches
have been instituted, has survived for shorter or
longer periods, according to the industrial and

•A. B. Wallace. "The Malay Archipelago, ” 18(59. Vol. I.

70 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

i

commercial development of the country in which
it obtained. This form, created by the splitting
up of the common property of the tribe, was
bound to disappear in its turn, with the disinte¬
gration of the patriarchal family, in order to
constitute the individual property of the several
members of the dissolved family.

Private property, which was to succeed collect¬
ive property, grew out of it. The house and
garden enclosed by walls and palisades were the
private property, absolute and inalienable, of the
family; no public authority had the right to
trench on it. In the interior of the house the
different members, not omitting the slaves, pos¬
sessed a peculium, some private property inde¬
pendent of that of the family ; this individual
property, acquired by personal toil of its owner,
was often considerable ; it consisted of slaves,
cattle, and movables of various kinds. The right
to a peculium was acquired slowly ; in the begin¬
ning no one member of the family could possess
aught in severalty; all that he acquired reverted
of right to the community.

The arable and pasture lands of which the
family had but the usufruct became ultimately
their private property, and when the family was
broken up, i. e., when every male upon marrying
quitted the collective dwelling for a house of his
own, landed property shared the fate of personal
property — it was divided amongst the children
and was held in severalty.

The evolution of property, passing from the
collective to the private form, has been extremely
slow, so slow, indeed, that in many a country

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 71

collective property, but for an external impulse,
might possibly have endured for centuries with¬
out suffering a change. Villages founded on
collective property form economic units; that is
to say, that they contain all they require for the
intellectual and material wants of their inhabit¬
ants, and that contrariwise, they comprise few
elements capable of determining change ; here
all things are accomplished in accordance with
traditions prescribed by the elders, and handed
down like precious heirlooms. In effect, once
a village has arrived at such a degree of indus¬
trial and agricultural development as to be capa¬
ble of satisfying the natural and simple wants
of the villagers, it would seem that it no longer
finds within itself any cause for change; an im¬
pulse from without is required to set it in motion.

Agriculture, which was the determinant cause
of the parcelling out of the common tribal prop¬
erty, was, moreover, one of the causes of the
splitting up of collectivist property. In propor¬
tion as improved methods of culture were intro¬
duced, the peasants recognized that one year’s
possession was insufficient to reap the benefits
of the manures and labor incorporated with the
lands that had been allotted them. They de¬
manded that the partitions, hitherto annual,
should in future take place every two, three,
seven, and even twenty years : in Russia the gov¬
ernment was constrained to impose the partitions
on the talcing of the census ; the peasants call
them black, i. e., bad partitions, which shows how
uncongenial they were to the families who con¬
sidered that they had proprietary rights in the

72 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

lands which had been given them at the last dis¬
tribution. Hence, it was the arable lands to
which improved methods were first applied,
which finally became inalienable ; whereas the
pasture continued to be apportioned annually.
So long as the arable lands are not private prop¬
erty, the trees planted in the communal lands
belong to those who have planted them, even
though they grow in territory which is subject to
periodical partition.

In the villages in which collective property ob¬
tains all the chiefs of families are co-equals ; they
all possess an equal right to a share in the allot¬
ment of the lands, because all originally be¬
longed to the same clan ; the strangers who have
come to reside there as artificers, fugitives, or
prisoners of war, are entitled, after having ob¬
tained the freedom of the city, which corresponds
to the antique adoption by the clan, to share in
the territorial partition equally with the original
inhabitants. This admission of strangers was
feasible only so long as the villages grew slowly
and as the land to be disposed of remained abun¬
dant : the populous villages were forced to dis¬
seminate, to send forth colonies and to clear the
neighboring forests. Every family was free, in¬
deed, to make clearances outside a given limit
and during a stated period, and was held to have
a possessory right in the lands which it had
brought under culture. But this abundance of un¬
cultivated land began to fail in the villages situ¬
ated near the seashore or by the riverside, which,
owing to their more favored position, attracted
a larger number of strangers. Into these villages,
which grew into small towns, it became difficult

FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM 73

to gain admisison, and for a right of sojourn
certain fees were levied.*

The new-comers were excluded from the terri¬
torial partitions, from the right of common of
pasture, and from the administration of the
towns ; these rights were strictly limited to the
primitive families, who constituted a privileged
body, a sort of communal aristocracy, to-wit, the
municipal aristrocracy, opposed alike to the feudal
or warlike aristocracy and to the alien artificers.
The latter, in order to resist the continual aggres¬
sions of the communal aristocracy, formed trade
corporations. This division of the members of
the city was throughout the Middle Ages a con¬
stant source of intestine warfare.

A degree of inequality crept into the primitive
families : it would happen that to one family fell
an undue share of allotments ; that others, in or¬
der to discharge their debts, were compelled to
relinquish the enjoyment of their lots, and so
forth. This engrossing of the land profoundly
wounded the sentiments of equality which had
not ceased to animate the members of the col¬
lectivist villages. Everywhere the monopolizers
of land have been loaded with maledictions ; in
Russia they are called the community-eaters ; _ in
Java it is forbidden to claim more than one in¬
heritance. Isaiah exclaims: “Woe unto them
that join house to house, that lay field to field,

•In his “Histolre des blens Communaux jusqu’au XIII. si8cle,”
1850, M. RlviSre cites an ordonnance of 1223, which states that
eTery stranger for the right of sojourn at Rheims must pay a bushel
of oats and a hen to the archbishop, eight crowns to the mayor, and
four to the aldermen. The archbishop is the feudal lord; the con¬
tributions due to him are comparatively insignificant, whereas those
Exacted by the mayor and aldermen, who belong to the communal
Nr municipal aristocracy, are very onerous for the period.

74 FAMILY OR CONSANGUINE COLLECTIVISM

till there be no place, that they may be placed
alone in the midst of the earth.” (v. 8.)

But among the causes that operated most pow¬
erfully in bringing misery and disorganization
into the village collectivities were the fiscal
charges, as witness Anglo-India.

At the outset the taxes were paid in kind and
proportionately to the nature of the harvest; but
this mode of payment no longer answers the
claims of a government which becomes central¬
ized ; it exacts money payment of the taxes in
advance, taking no account of the state of the
crops. The villagers, as a consequence, are con¬
strained to apply to the usurers, those pests of
the village ; this vile brood, who are countenanced
by the government, rob the peasant shamelessly ;
they transform him into a nominal proprietor,
who tills his fields with no other object than to
pay off his debts, which increase in proportion
as he discharges them. The contempt and hatred
inspired by the usurers is widespread and in¬
tense ; if the anti-Semitic campaign in Russia has
given rise to such sanguinary scenes in the vil¬
lages, it is because the peasant made no distinc¬
tion between the Jew and usurer; many an
orthodox Christian who needed not to be cir-
cumcized in order to strip the cultivators as clean
as ever the purest descendant of Abraham could
have done, was robbed and massacred during the
height of the fever of the anti-Semitic movement.
These various causes co-operated with the de¬
velopment of industry and commerce to accelerate
the monopolizing of the land, vested more and
more in private families, and to precipitate the
dissolution of the patriarchal family.

CHAPTER IV

FEUDAL PROPERTY

I

Feudal property presents itself under two
forms ; immovable property, called corporeal by
the French feudists, consisting of a castle or
manor with its appurtenances and surrounding
lands, “as far as a capon can fly and movable or
incorporeal property, consisting of military serv¬
ice, aids, reliefs, fines, tithes, etc.

Feudal property, of which ecclesiastical prop¬
erty is but a variety, springs up in the midst of
village communities based on collective property,
and evolves at their expense ; after a long series
of transformations it is resolved into bourgeois
or capitalist property, the adequate form of pri¬
vate property.

Feudal property, and the social organization
which corresponds thereto, serve as a bridge
from family, or, more correctly, consanguine col¬
lectivism to bourgeois individualism.

Under the feudal system the landlord has obli¬
gations and is far from enjoying the liberty of
the capitalist — the right to use and abuse. The
land is not marketable ; it is burdened with com
ditions, and is transmitted according to tradi¬
tionary customs which the proprietor dares not
infringe ; he is bound to discharge certain defined

76

FEUDAL PROPERTY

duties toward his hierarchical superiors and in¬
feriors.

The system, in its essence, is a compact of
reciprocal services ; the feudal lord only holds his
land and possesses a claim on the labor and har¬
vests of his tenants and vassals on condition of
doing suit and service to his superiors and lend¬
ing aid to his dependents. On accepting the oath
of fealty and homage the lord engaged to protect
his vassal against all and sundry by all the means
at his command; in return for which support the
vassal was bound to render military and personal
service and make certain payments to his lord.
The latter, in his turn, for the sake of protection,
commended himself to a more puissant feudal
lord, who himself stood in the relation of vas¬
salage to a suzerain, to the king or emperor.

All the members of the feudal hierarchy, from
the serf upwards to the king or emperor, were
bound by the ties of reciprocal duties. A sense
of duty was the spirit of feudal society, just as
the lust of lucre is the soul of our own. All
things were made to contribute to the impressing
it upon the minds of great and small alike. Pop¬
ular poetry, that primeval and all-powerful in¬
strument of education, exalted duty into a relig¬
ion. Roland, the epic hero of feudalism, assailed
and overwhelmed by the Saracens at Roncevalles,
upbraids his companion-in-arms, Oliver, who
complains of Charlemagne’s desertion of them, in
this wise:

FEUDAL PROPERTY

77

“Ne dites tel ultrage.

Mai seit de l’coer ki el piz se cuardet!

Nus remeindrum en estal en la place;

Par nus i iert e li colps e li caples.”

“Pur sun seignur deit hum suffrir granzmals;

E endurer e forz freiz e granz calz
Si’n deit hum perdre del’sanc e de la earn
Fier de ta lance e jo de Durendal,

Ma bone espee que li Reis me dunat
Se jo i moerc, dire poet ki l’avrat,

Que ele fut a nobilie vassal!”*

‘“Speak not such outrage.

Curse on the heart that cravens in the breast!

Fast in the place will we maintain our stand.

And blows and sword-thrusts shall be dealt by us.”

“Much evil must one suffer for his lord;

Endure alike the hard cold and high heat ;

And for him must one lose his blood and bone!

Fight with thy lance, as I with Durendal,

My good sword that my king did give to me ;

And If I die, who gets it well may say,

Right noble was the vassal owned the sword !”

— “Chanson de Roland,” secs, xciii. and xciv.

The song of Roland was frequently sung at the beginning of a
battle. At Hastings, when the two hostile armies were face to face,
“the Earl” (William, Earl of Normandy), says William of Malmes¬
bury, commenced the song of Roland, “that the warlike example of
that man might stimulate the soldiers.” According to Wace, the
Trouvere, the song was sung by the Norman, Taillefer :

“Taillefer ki moult bien cantout
Sur un eheval gi tost alout,

Devant le Due allout cantant
De Karlemaigne e de Rollant,

E d’Oliver e des vassals
Qui moururent en Roncevals.”

Thus Englished by Sir Walter Scott : —

“Taillefer, who sang both well and loud,

Came mounted on a courser proud ;

Before the Duke the minstrel sprung
And loud of Charles and Roland sung
Of Oliver and champions mo
Who died at fatal Roneevaux.”

As Taillefer sang he played with his sword, and, casting it high
in the air, caught it again with his right hand, while all in chorus
shouted the cry of “God aid us!”

78

FEUDAL PROPERTY

Consanguine collectivism had but created the
communal unit ; feudalism called forth a provin¬
cial and national life by knitting together the in¬
dependent and insulated groups of a province or
a nation by a reciprocity of duties and services.
Viewed in this light feudalism is a federation of
baronies.

The duties which the lord owed his serfs, ten¬
ants, and vassals were manifold and onerous, but
with the decay of feudalism he shook off these
duties, while, at the same time, he continued to
exact and even aggravated, the dues and obli¬
gations which, originally, had been but the recom¬
pense of services he had rendered. Not
content with neglecting his feudal duties, he
raised a claim to the lands of his vassals, as also
to the communal domains and forests. The
feudists, justly stigmatized as “feudal pens,”
maintained that the woodlands, forests, and mead¬
ows had immemorially belonged to the lord, who
had merely resigned the usufruct thereof to his
serfs and vassals. The English feudists made
shorter work of it. They fabricated history and
declared that at some period — “sometimes vaguely
associated with the feudalization of Europe, some¬
times more precisely with the Norman Conquest
— the entire soil of England was confiscated ; that
the whole of each manor became the lord’s
demesne ; that the lord divided certain parts of
it among his free retainers, but kept a part in his
own hands to be tilled by his villeins ; that all
which was not required for this distribution was
left as the lord’s waste ; and that all customs
which cannot be traced to feudal principles grew

FEUDAL PROPERTY

79

up insensibly through the subsequent tolerance
of the feudal chief.”*

The bourgeois historians and Merlin, the ter¬
rible jurist of the convention and destroyer of
the communal lands, solicitous to trace the private
form of property to the feudal period, adopted the
interested thesis of the aristocrats. The history of
the genesis and evolution of feudal property will
prove the unsoundness of the feudists’ theory and
show that seignorial property was built up by
fraud and violence.

II

The feudal system appears as the hierarchical
organization of authority, notwithstanding that
it was the outgrowth of a society of equals ; but
equality could never have brought forth despotism
but for the co-operation, during centuries, of
events which, for the understanding of that gene¬
sis, must be kept in mind.

The Teutonic tribes who had invaded Western
Europe were a nomad population, in a state of
barbarism nearly akin to that of the Iroquois
tribes at the time of the discovery of America.
Strabo tells us that the barbarians established in
Belgium and in the Northeast of France were
ignorant of agriculture, and lived exclusively on
milk and flesh ; principally on pork, fresh or salt ;

*H. S. Maine, "Village Communities,” p. 84. This opinion was
formulated, in his evidence before the Select Committee of the
House of Commons which sat to consider the subject of enclosures,
by a lawyer, Mr. Blamire, who, according to Mr. Maine, was “an
official unusually familiar with English landed property in its less
usual shapes.”

80

FEUDAL PROPERTY

that they possessed herds of swine — savage and
dangerous as wolves — roaming at large in the im¬
mense forests which covered the country, and
so abundant as to supply them with food and the
means of buying the few articles they stood in
need of. Strabo adds that the Gauls had similar
manners, and that to know them it required but
to contemplate the Germans of his time. When
Caesar landed in England he found that the Brit¬
ons inhabiting Kent possessed much the same
manners and customs as the Gauls ; they did not
till the land ; they subsisted on a milk diet and on
flesh, and were clad in skins. They painted their
bodies blue in order to strike terror into their
enemies, and had their wives in common by
groups of ten or twelve, including brothers,
fathers and sons.* In Europe and elsewhere
the point of departure is the same.

The widest equality reigned among these bar¬
barians, who were all warriors and hunters, and
whose manners and usages tended to preserve this
heroic equality. When they settled and began
to practice a rude kind of agriculture, they under¬
took warlike expeditions for the purpose of keep¬
ing up the exercise of fighting. A war chief of
renown needed but to announce that he was start¬
ing on a campaign to see warriors flock to him,
eager for spoils and glory. During the expedi¬
tion they owed him obedience, as did the Greek
warriors to Agamemnon, but they ate at the same
table and banqueted with him without distinction
of persons, and the booty was divided equally and
by lot. Back again in their villages, they recovered

*“De Bello Galileo,” V., sec. 14.

FEUDAL PROPERTY 81

their independence and equality, and the war chief
lost his authority.

It is in this free and equal fashion that the Scan¬
dinavians, and in fact all barbarians, organized
their expeditions. These piratical manners pre¬
vailed during the whole of the middle ages ; when
William the Conqueror and Pope Innocent III.
wanted to levy an army against the English and
the Albigenses, it was only necessary for them to
promise a division of the spoils taken from the
vanquished. Before the battle of Hastings, just
as the troops were about to engage in fight, Wil¬
liam, with a loud voice, called out to his soldiers :
“Fight bravely and put all to death ; if we win,
we shall all be rich ; what I get, you shall get ; if
I conquer, you will conquer ; if I obtain the land,
you will obtain it.” His Holiness, the Pope, used
similar language on the 10th of March, in the
year 1208, on stirring up the faithful to fight the
heretic Albigenses : “Up now, soldiers of Christ ;
root out impiety by every means that God may
have revealed to you (the means that the Lord
had revealed were fire, rapine, and murder), drive
out of their castles the Earl of Toulouse and his
vassals, and seize upon their lands, that the ortho¬
dox Catholics may be established in the dominions
of the heretics.” The Crusades which launched
the warriors of Europe on the East were similarly
organized, having the delivery of the Holy Sepul¬
chre for pretense and plunder for object.*

*A celebrated bourgeois economist, M. de Molinari, has inno¬
cently compared the financial enterprises of our times with the
predatory expeditions of the Middle Ages. Both, indeed, aim at
plunder,' but with this difference, that whereas the feudal warrior
staked his life, the capitalists who gnaw, rat-like, at the 10 and 20
per cent Interest, risk their capital alone, which they have taken
good oare not io create.

82

FEUDAL PROPERTY

, When rhe barbarians, in quest of territory, had
conquered a country, they either put the inhabit¬
ants to death (as the Hebrews did, by Divine
order), or contented themselves with ransacking
the towns ; they settled in the country, which they
set about cultivating in their own way, and al¬
lowed the vanquished to live alongside of them
according to their own customs and usages. But
when they became sedentary and cultivators of
the land, they little by little lost their warlike
habits, although some of them remained invinci¬
bly attached to the primitive manners. The Ger¬
mans observed by Tacitus had already lost some
of their savage fierceness ; they had established
themselves and become addicted to agriculture ;
the tribe of the Catti, however, were dedicated to
war. Always in the forefront of battle, they occu¬
pied the most dangerous posts ; they possessed
neither houses nor lands, nor had they cares of
any sort. Wherever they presented themselves
they were entertained. These warriors formed a
kind of standing army, charged with defending
those of their countrymen who were engaged in
agricultural pursuits.

But no sooner had the invading barbarians es¬
tablished themselves and lost their native vigor
than other barbarians pounced upon them as on
an easy prey, and treated them like a conquered
people. During many centuries compact masses
of barbarians overran Europe : in the east, the
Goths, Germans, and Huns; in the north and
west, the Scandinavians ; in the south, the Ara¬
bians ; desolating the towns and country in their
passage. And when from east and north and

FEUDAL PROPERTY

83

south this human flood had ceased to pour down
into Europe, and when the barbarians had lost
their nomadic habits and resumed the work of
civilization which they had arrested and frus¬
trated, there was unloosed another scourge ; bands
of armed men overspread the country, plundering
and ransacking and levying contributions on every
side; the battle over, the soldiers of the hostile
armies fraternized and started on an expedition
on their own account.*

During many centuries people lived in continual
fear of robbery, kidnaping and murder. The in¬
vasions of the barbarians that ruined and dis¬
organized the country did not prevent the tribes
already settled from quarreling among them¬
selves. These constant internecine quarrels ren¬
der barbarian nations powerless in the face of
strangers; they are unable to stifle their clan
hatreds and their village feuds in front of a com¬
mon enemy. Tacitus, intent solely on the suprem¬
acy of the Romans, adjured the gods to foment
this disastrous discord ; for, said he, “fortune can
bestow no higher benefit on Rome than the dissen¬
sions of her enemies.”t

The inhabitants of the towns and provinces
were constrained, for safety’s sake, to live in

•After the battle of Poictiers (1356) the soldiers, being ont of
employment, associated and made war on their own behalf. In
1360, after the Treaty of Bretigny, which restored King John of
France — a prisoner in England — to liberty, the soldiers of the two
armies were dismissed. They formed themselves into bands and
took the field. One band operated in the north, another, and mora
considerable one, commanded by Talleyrand Perigord, descended into
the valley of the Rhone, and after having ravaged La Provence
passed through Avignon — where the Pope regaled the chiefs and
gave absolution and a present of 500,000 ducats to the soldiers—
eansacking the towns and laying waste the country.

t‘‘Germania.” 1, sec. xxvlii.

84

FEUDAL PROPERTY

fortified places. The charters of Auvergne of the
11th and 12th centuries designate such villages
by the term of castra (camp). In the towns and
boroughs houses were constructed in view of the
necessity of sustaining a siege.

The village collectivities which, at the outset,
were composed almost exclusively of individuals
belonging to the same clan, and consequently
equals, elected chieftains charged with their de¬
fense, who eventually came to gather into their
hands the several rights of jurisdiction, of settling
differences, of interpreting the customs, and
maintaining order. The Franks in their barbar¬
ous Latin called such a chieftain grafUo, from
graf, the German for count. The elected chiefs
of the village collectivities are the feudal barons
in embryo.

In the beginning they were simply public offi¬
cers subjected to the authority of the council of
the elders and the popular assemblies, and with
the execution of whose decisions they were
charged ; they were severely punished for every
neglect of duty.* The graffio of the Frankish
tribes who omitted to expel a stranger whose
expulsion had been voted by the assembly was
amerced in a fine of 200 gold solidi. ( Lex Salica.)
This was exactly the sum assessed as composition
for murder. (Were gild).

*The customary of Beam began with a haughty declaration of inde¬
pendence. “These are the customs of Bearn, which show that of old
there existed no lords in Beam. But the inhabitants, hearing praise
of a knight of Bigorre, set forth in quest of him and made him a
lord for the space of one year. But he being unwilling to conform
to the customs ; the popular assembly of Pau summoned him to
respect the customs ... he, refusing to obey, was killed In the
asaembly.”

FEUDAL PROPERTY

85

The powers which were at a later date to be¬
come the appanage of the feudal lords, belonged
to the community met in full assembly. ( Folk -
moote.) All of the inhabitants were bound to at¬
tend in arms, under penalty of a fine; certain
village collectivities possessed serfs, as, later on,
did the lords.

The laws of Wales, collected in 940, by order
of King Hoel-Du, and published in 1841 by A.
Owen, indicate the mode of election and the
qualities and the functions of these village chiefs
which do not substantially differ from those of
the barbarian war-chief. The chief of the clan was
chosen by all the heads of families having wives
and legitimate offspring, and he held his office for
life; among certain peoples his functions were
temporary and revocable. It was imperative “that
he should speak on behalf of his kin and be
listened to ; that he should fight on behalf of his
kin and be feared ; that he should be security on
behalf of his kin and be accepted.” When he
administered justice he was assisted by the seven
oldest villagers ; under his orders stood an
avenger, charged with executing vengeance ; for
justice at that epoch was but revenge — the lex
talionis — blow for blow, wound for wound. On
the first alarm, after the clamor, called haro by
the Normans and biafor by the Basques, the in¬
habitants were bound to issue forth from their
houses, in arms, and place themselves under their
chieftain’s command; he was the military chief,
to whom all owed fidelity and obedience. Who¬
ever failed to respond to his appeal was fined.
In certain boroughs we find a military organiza-

86

FEUDAL PROPERTY

tion, e. g., at Tarbes the inhabitants were formed
into tithings having at their head a tithing-man,
whose office it was to see that all the men were
armed and that their arms were in good condi¬
tion.*

All functions amongst barbarian tribes tend to
become vested in certain families; the weaver’s,
smith’s, priest’s, and magician’s callings are
handed down from father to son ; it is in this way
that castes arise. The chief, charged with the
maintenance of order at home and the duty of
defense abroad, was chosen out of the body of the
inhabitants ; but little by little it became the habit
to choose him out of the same family, which, ulti¬
mately, itself designated the chief of the commu¬
nity and omitted the formality of an election. It
would be erroneous to suppose that in the begin¬
ning the chieftainship carried with it any special
privilege; so far, indeed, was chieftainship from
being coveted, that the man elected by the com¬
munity was made liable to a fine if he refused to
accept the charge. At Folkestone, if either the
mayor or any of the jurats refused to assume their
respective offices upon being elected, “the com¬
moners were to go and beat down their principal
messuage.” At Hastings it was a law that “if
the bailiff will not accept the charge all the com¬
moners shall go and beat down his tenement.”-!-

Greatness was dangerous : the Scandinavians,
in great calamities — in a pressing famine, for ex¬
ample — sacrificed their king, as the highest price

•L. Deyllle, “Etudes historiques sur Tarbes.” Bulletin d* la
Societe Academique des Hautes Pyrenees, sixlgme annee, deni
llyraison. 1861.

tGomme, “Village Communities,” p. 254.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

87

with which they could purchase the Divine favor.
In this manner the first king of Vermaland, a
province of Sweden, was burnt in honor of Odin,
to put an end to a great dearth. Earl Hakon, of
Norway, offered his son in sacrifice to obtain of
Odin the victory over the Jomsburg pirates, and
Gideon immolated his daughter to Jehovah for a
similar reason.

The Indian village communities observed in our
day have, for public officers, weavers, smiths,
schoolmasters, brahmins, dancers, etc., who are
in the service of the community, which rewards
them by a lodging, an allowance of grain, and the
allotment of a plot of land cultivated by the
villagers.*

“In early Greece the demiurgoi seem to be the
analogues of these Hindoo officials. Homer men¬
tions the herald, the prophet, the bard, all of
whom, although we cannot trace their exact posi¬
tion, appear to have exercised some kind of pub¬
lic function. Among the Keltic clans similar
classes are known to have existed.”!

The chiefs elected by the village collectivities
were treated in the same way as the officers of the
Hindoo villages : their companions, in reward of
their services, allotted them a larger share of land
than to the rest of the inhabitants. Thus, in the
borough of Malmesbury, the alderman, who was

‘These pieces of land frequently bear the name of the trade of
the exercise of which they were the reward. “There are,” says
Maine, “several English parishes in which certain pieces of land
in the comomn field have from time immemorial been known by the
name of a particular trade ; and there is often a popular belief that
nobody not following the trade can legally be the owner of the lot
associated with it.”

tDr. Hearn, “Aryan Households,” p. 150.

88

FEUDAL PROPERTY

the chief man, was annually granted a piece of
land, known as the “Alderman’s kitchen,” ip order
that he might devote himself exclusively to the
discharge of his office ; his fields were cultivated
by the commoners, who allowed him a share in
their harvest and live stock.*

At the outset no special distinction marks out
the elected chief ; but the practice of continuously
choosing him in the same family ended by creat¬
ing a privilege that was changed into a hereditary
right ; the head of the privileged family became,
by right of succession, and without requiring to
submit to an election, the natural chief of the
village. The royal authority had no other origin
than this in the Frankish tribes. The leudes must
be the heads of the families of the clan which are
charged with furnishing the military chieftains ;
just as, among the Hebrews, the tribes of Levy
must furnish the priests. They resided with the
king and were partakers of the royal councils ;
upon occasions they resisted him and even offered
him violence ; it was these leudes who elected the
king, whose functions became hereditary.

The village collectivities were perpetually at
war with one another ; in the partitions of the con¬
quered lands the share of the chieftain and his
family was, doubtless, more considerable than that
of the commoners ; to the privilege of birth was
gradually superadded that of property.

On electing the village chief, the choice fell, we

•“The Basutos assemble every year to dig up and sow the field
appropriated for the personal maintenance of their chief’s first
wife. Hundreds of men, in a straight line, raise and lower their
mattocks simultaneously and with perfect regularity. The entire
village concurs in the maintenance of the chieftain.” Casalis,
‘‘The Basutos.”

FEUDAL PROPERTY

89

may presume, on the owner of the most spacious
dwelling-house, affording the greatest facilities of
defense and the best place of refuge for the
peasants on an emergency. This strategical ad¬
vantage, which, originally, may have been a mat¬
ter of accident, came to be a condition exacted
from every chieftain ; in the Indian villages be¬
yond the border the burj, or watch tower, is al¬
ways attached to the house of the chief, and in
constant use as a place of refuge and observation.
During the feudal period every lord was bound
to possess a castle or fortified house having a
courtyard protected by moats and drawbridges, a
large square tower and a grist mill, to enable the
peasants to shelter their crops and cattle, grind
their corn and organize their defense. The chief¬
tain’s dwelling-house was considered as a sort of
common house, and actually became such in times
of danger. The members of the village collectivi¬
ties applied themselves to repairing and fortifying
it, surrounding it with walls and trenches ; it was
the custom for the members of a village to aid in
the construction and repair of the houses of all
the inhabitants without distinction. This custom
is the origin of the right possessed by the feudal
lord “to compel his vassals and tenants to con¬
tribute towards the construction of the fortifica¬
tions in time of war.” And the commentary of
the feudal writer indicates the origin of the right.
“And as these fortifications serve alike for the
security of the country and the towns, the safety
of persons, and the conservation of property, non¬
residents owning lands in the locality are bound
to contribute towards the same.”

90

FEUDAL PROPERTY

The barbarians, who were more of warriors
than of cultivators, defended their houses and
villages themselves ; on the first alarm they rushed
forth in battle array and placed themselves under
the command of the chieftain, to assist him in
beating back the aggressors ; in the watch tower
they mounted guard by day and watched at night ;
in many places the lord retained the right to exact
from his vassals this service of watch and ward.
But when agricultural habits began to get the
upper hand, the peasants commuted this military
service, which interfered with their pursuits,
into a tribute to the chief ; on condition that he
should maintain a body of men-at-arms, charged
exclusively with the work of protection and de¬
fense. A proportion of every fine imposed on a
delinquent was reserved for the chieftain and his
men-at-arms. The chief was thus placed in a
position to maintain an armed force which finally
enabled him to impose his will and dominate his
ancient companions.

The village built in the best strategical positions
became a centre ; in the event of invasion the in¬
habitants of the adjacent villages flocked to it for
refuge, and in return for the protection afforded
them in the hour of danger they were called on to
contribute towards the costs of repairing the
fortifications and maintaining the men-at-arms.
The authority of these village chiefs extended to
the surrounding country.

In this natural manner were generated in the
collectivist villages, all of whose members were
equal in rights and duties, the first elements of
feudalism ; they would have remained stable dur-

FEUDAL PROPERTY

91

ing centuries, as in India, but for the impulse of
external events which disturbed them and infused
them with new life. Wars and conquests de¬
veloped these embryonic germs, and by agglom¬
erating and combining them, built up the vast
feudal system diffused during the Middle Ages,
over Western Europe.

What in modern times has taken place in India
helps us to realize the role of conquest in trans¬
forming the village chieftain into the feudal
baron. When the English, established along the
sea coasts, extended their dominion inland, they
were brought into contact with villages organized
in the maner described above ; every agricultural
group was commanded by a peasant, the head¬
man, who spoke in its name, and negotiated with
the conquerors. The English authorities did not
trouble to inquire into the origin and precise na¬
ture of his powers, or of the office held by him in
the community ; they preferred to take for granted
that he was the master of the village of which he
was but the represehtative, and to treat him as
such ; they enhanced and solidified his authority
by all the weight conferred by the right of the
strongest, and on divers occasions assisted the
head-man in oppressing his quondam companions,
and despoiling them of their rights and posses¬
sions.

The mediaeval conquerors acted in an analogous
fashion; they confirmed the local chiefs in their
possession of those posts in the villages which
were too unimportant to be bestowed as benefices
on their liegemen, and, in return, made them
responsible for the levying of the taxes and the

92

FEUDAL PROPERTY

conduct of their dependents, thereby according
them an authority they had not previously pos¬
sessed in the village collectivities. But in every
strategical place they installed one of their own
warriors ; it was a military post which they con¬
fided to him ; the length of tenure of such posts,
called benefices, was subject to variation; at first,
they were revoked at pleasure, afterwards granted
for life, and ultimately became hereditary. The
beneficiary tenants took advantage of circum¬
stances to turn their hereditary possessions into
alodial property, i. e., into land exempt from all
obligations. In France the early kings were re¬
peatedly obliged to make ordinances against this
kind of usurpation. “Let not him who holds a
benefice of the emperor or the church convert
any of it into his patrimony,” says Charlemagne
in a capitulary of the year 803. (Cap. viii., s. 3.)
But such ordinances were powerless to prevent
the conversion of military chiefs into feudal
barons. It may be said, therefore, that the feudal
system had a dual origin ; on the one hand it grew
out of the conditions under which the village
collectivities evolved, and on the other it sprang
from conquest.

The feudal barons, whether village-chiefs trans¬
mogrified by the natural march of events, or mili¬
tary chieftains installed by the conquerors, were
bound to reside in the country which it was their
duty to administer and defend. The territory they
possessed and the dues they received, in the shape
of labor and tithes, were the recompense of ser¬
vices rendered by them to the cultivators placed
under their jurisdiction. The barons and their

FEUDAL PROPERTY

93

men-at-arms formed a permanent army, nourished
and maintained by the inhabitants whom they
directly protected.*

. The baron owed justice, aid, and protection to
his vassals, and these, in their turn, owed fidelity
and homage to their lord. At every change, con¬
sequent on the death of either lords or vassals,
the vassal was bound, within a space of 40 days,
to repair to the principal manor — there and not
elsewhere, to indicate that he only swore fealty
prospectively to a refuge in the baron’s castle ; if
the lord was absent and had left no representative,
the vassal made a vow of fealty in front of the
manor-door, and caused the fact to be entered on
the records. He was bound to come with his
head uncovered and his belt ungirt, without sword
and spurs, and to kneel down with his hands
joined. The lord, in accepting his oath, took his
vassal’s hands into his own, in token of union and
protection. The vassal thereupon enumerated the
lands and dependencies which he placed under the
safeguard of his lord ; in early times he brought
with him a clod of turf from his fields. Occasion¬
ally, too, the lord was the first to take his engage¬
ments toward his vassals. In the Fors de Bigorre
(customary of Bigorre), it is said that the Comte
de Bigorre, “before receiving the oath of the in¬
habitants of the land, delegated to that effect,
shall himself take the oath that he will change
nothing in the ancient customs, nor in such as he
shall find the people in possession of ; he must

•In the Romance languages the original name of the feudal lord,
the term baron, signified a strong man, a doughty warrior, which
well indicates the essentially military character of feudalism.
Vassal similarly bore the sense of brave, valiant.

94

FEUDAL PROPERTY

have his oath confirmed by that of four nobles of
his domain.”

The vassal owed military service to his lord
“when a foreign army had invaded his territory,
when he wanted to deliver his besieged castle, or
when he set out on a declared war” — a war, that
is to say, entered upon in the interests of the in¬
habitants. But, although closely bound to him,
the vassal might abandon his lord in certain cases
specified in the capitularies of the years 813 to
816, to wit, if his lord had sought to kill him or
reduce him to slavery, beaten him with a stick or
sword, dishonored his wife or daughter, or robbed
him of his patrimony.

So soon as the authority of the feudal nobility
was constituted, it became, in its turn, a source
of trouble to the country whose defense it had
been charged with. The barons, in order to en¬
large their territories and extend their power,
carried on continual warfare among themselves,
only interrupted now and again by a short truce
necessitated by the tillage of the fields. The wars
of the barons may be compared to the industrial
and commercial competition of modern times.
The outcome is the same; both alike culminate in
the concentration of property, and the social su¬
premacy which it bestows. The vanquished, when
not killed outright or utterly despoiled, became
the vassals of the conqueror, who seized upon a
portion of their lands and vassals. The petty
barons disappeared for the benefit of the great
ones, who became potent feudatories, and estab¬
lished ducal courts at which the lords in vassal-
age were bound to attend.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

95

It frequently happened that the barons turned
highwaymen, who plundered the fields and robbed
the towns and travelers; they deserved the epi¬
thets of gens-pille-hommes, gens-tue-hommes
(killers and pickers of men) which were applied
to them *

The towns were constrained to put themselves
under the safeguard of the king or great feuda¬
tories, who concentrated the lands and feudal
power, and changed the barons into courtiers.
But in proportion as the petty barons disappeared,
by so much the warfare slackened between castle
and castle ; a measure of tranquillity was restored
to the country, and the necessity for feudal pro¬
tection ceased to be paramount. The lords, conse¬
quently, were in a position to absent themselves
from their domains and to betake themselves to
the ducal and royal courts ; thither they went to
play the courtier, and ceased to act as defenders
of their vassals and dependents. From the hour
that the cultivator no longer stood in need of mili¬
tary service, the feudal system had no reason to
exist. Feudalism, born of warfare, perished by
warfare ; it perished by the very qualities which
had justified its existence.

•Vitry, the legate of Innocent III, who in Germany and Bel¬
gium preached the crusade against the Albigenses (in 1208), writes:
“The lords, despite their titles and dignities, continue to sally
forth for prey and to play the robber and brigand, desolating entire
regions by Are.” The manners of the clergy were neither better
nor worse. The Archbishop of Narbonne, at the end of the twelfth
century, strolled about the fields with his canons and archdeacons,
hunting the wild beasts, plundering the peasants, and violating the
women. He had in his pay a band of Aragonese routiers wbom he
employed to ransack the country. The bishops and abbots loved
mightily, sings a troubadour, “fair women and red wine, fine
horses and rich array ; living in luxury, whereas our Lord was con¬
tent to live in poverty.”

96

FEUDAL PROPERTY

But so long as the feudal system subsisted,
there remained traces of the primitive equality
which had been its cradle, even though every
vestige had disappeared of the equality which had
distinguished the relations of the lord with his
tenants and vassals. The feudal lord and the
vassal became co-equals once again in the com¬
munal assemblies which discussed the agricultural
interests alike of the villager and the lord ; the
assemblies met without his sanction, and despite
his unwillingness to convoke them. His com¬
munal rights were as limited as those of the rest
of the inhabitants ; the heads of cattle he was en¬
titled to send to pasture on the commons were
strictly prescribed. Delisle, in his interesting
study of the agricultural classes of Normandy,
cites texts which show the limitation of his rights,
e. g., the Seigneur de Bricqueville was entitled to
send only two oxen and one horse to graze on the
meadows. He was so far from being privileged
that as La Poix de Fremenvilie, the great feudal
jurist, informs us, “The lord who possesses no
cattle of his own is not allowed to introduce any
strange cattle, whether by letting on lease, selling,
or even lending gratis his rights of common.”

Ill

The origin of ecclesiastical property is analo¬
gous to that of seignorial property. In those tur¬
bulent times men fled for protection to the Church
no less than to the baron’s castle ; the priestly
power, indeed, far outweighed that of the baron ;
it was the priest who held the key of paradise.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

97

Men will their goods to the Church on their
death beds in theTiope of' securing a seat in para¬
dise ; this custom, which was voluntary at the
outset, became so general that it ended by being
imposed as an obligation. ‘Wny person dying
without leaving a part of his possessions to the
Church — which was termed dying deconfes — was
debarred from communion and sepulture. If a
man died intestate his relations had to appeal to
the bishops to appoint arbiters, who conjointly
with themselves fixed the amount which the de¬
funct ought to have bequeathed if he had made
a testament.”*

The fear of the end of the world in the mil¬
lennium contributed to multiply the donations to
the priests and monasteries, for where was the
use of keeping one’s lands and chattels, when
men and beast were about to perish, and the hour
of judgment was at hand? But when the year
1000 had passed away without any sort of cata¬
clysm, people recovered from their fright, and
bitterly regretted having parted with their be¬
longings during their lifetime. With a view to
intimidating the good people who demanded the
restitution of their goods, the Church had re¬
course to anathemas and malisons. The cartu¬
laries of the period abound with formulas of
maledictions calculated to strike terror into the
hearts of the donator and his relations ; here is
a sample of the imprecations which frequently
recur in the records of Auvergne. “If a stranger,
if any of your relations, if your son or your
daughter should be insensate enough to contest

•Montesquieu, “L’Esprit des lois.”

98

FEUDAL PROPERTY

this donation, to lay hands upon the goods dedi¬
cated to God and consecrated to His saints, may
they be struck, like Herod, with an awful wound,
may they, like Dathan, Abiram, and Judas, who
sold the Lord, be tortured in the depths of hell.”*

But the property of the Church was derived,
also, from other less turbid sources : men gave
away their possessions and even their persons in
exchange for her temporal protection. “The
major part of the acts of voluntary slavery (ob-
noxatio),” says Guerard,+ “were prompted by the
spirit of devotion, and by the indulgence practiced
by the bishops and abbots towards their serfs, and
by the benefits which the law accorded them.”
The serfs and vassals of the Church and monas¬
teries enjoyed equal privileges with those belong¬
ing to the king; they were entitled to a threefold
compensation in case of injury, damage, or death.
The king and the Church undertook to prosecute
the culprit, whereas, ordinarily, that was the busi¬
ness of the family of the injured person.

The convents were fortified places able to sus¬
tain regular sieges, and the monks were experts
in the use of arms. At Hastings, churchmen
fought on both sides ; the Abbey of Hida, a con¬
vent situate in Winchester, had brought Harold
a contingent of twelve monks, who all fell fight¬
ing. The high dignitaries of the Church were
military chieftains, who laid down their cross and
chasuble to grasp a sword and don a cuirass.
Many, like the Bishop of Cahors, when they offi-

♦Cited by H. P. Rivi&re in his “Histoire des Institutions de
1’ Auvergne,” 1874.

tB. Gufirard, “Polyptique de l’Abbe Irminon,” section 145.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

99

dated, solemnly deposited on the altar their
casque, cuirass, sword, and iron gauntlet. Roland
at Roncevalles says to Oliver, in praise of Arch¬
bishop Turpin : —

“Li arceves ques est mult bons chevaliers :

Nen ad meilleur en terre, desuz ciel,

Bien set ferir e de lance e d’espiet.”

In their enthusiasm for his prowess,

“Dient Francais: ‘Ci ad grant vasselage,

En l’arceves que est bien la croce salve,

Kar placet Dieu qu ’assez de tels ait Carles’.”*

During the feudal period the clergy alone
possessed instruction ; this, like their weapons,
they placed at the service of the parishioners who
maintained them. Many a time they interposed
between the rural populations and the lords who
oppressed them ; just as in Ireland, nowadays, the
inferior clergy make common cause against the
landlords with the farmers and peasants who pro¬
vide for their subsistence. But if between the rural
and urban populations and the priests there sub¬
sisted a close union, the clergy were often at war
with the feudal nobility. If in their fits of super¬
stitious terror and feverish piety the barons were
capable of stripping themselves of a portion of
their lands and riches in favor of the churches
and monasteries, in their calmer moments they
hankered after the possessions of the monks and

•“A right good cavalier, the Archbishop,

None better on the earth, under the sky;

Expert in fight alike with lance and spear.”

“The French cry out: ‘‘Here be great bravery;

The Cross is in safe keep with the Archbishop ;

Would God that Charles had more knights like to him I”

100

FEUDAL PROPERTY

priests, and seized the first opportunity of secur¬
ing them.

The early kings and military chieftains be¬
stowed churches and monasteries on their liege
men and soldiers as rewards ; from the 8th to the
11th centuries a considerable number of churches
were in the hands of laymen. The kings of
France down to the 18th century had conserved
the droit de regale, which entitled them to all the
fruits of the vacant bishoprics. When Henry
VIII., the Bluebeard of English story and the
Supreme Pontiff of England, in order to reform
the Church, suppressed not fewer than 645 mon¬
asteries, 90 colleges, 2,374 chantries and free
chapels, 100 hospitals, with revenue amounting
to two millions per annum, and shared the plun¬
der with his courtiers and concubines, he practiced
on a larger scale what all his predecessors had
done.

The nobility and clergy, the two classes who
during the Middle Ages struggled for supremacy,
discharged important and necessary functions ;
the tithes and socage-duty they received were the
price of the services they rendered.

IV

The feudal burdens outlasted the feudal barons,
who vanished when they had grown useless ; these
dues became the appanage of nobles, often of
middle class origin, who did not render the
services of which these dues had been the meed.
Violently attacked by the bourgeois writers, and
energetically defended by the feudists, they were

FEUDAL PROPERTY

101

definitely suppressed in France by the revolution
of 1789. The earlier English revolution which
established bourgeois authority, the House of
Commons by the side of the House of Lords, has
allowed a number of feudal privileges to subsist
which are anarchronisms at a time when the
aristocratic or landed classes are simply a wing
of the “great middle class” in every sense of the
word.

The political economists and liberal bourgeois
of this century, instead of investigating the origin
of feudal obligations, exposing the transforma¬
tions they have undergone, and explaining the
necessity thereof, have fancied that they were
giving proofs of learning and liberality of spirit
by a sweeping condemnation of everything in any
way connected with the feudal system. Howbeit,
it is imperative for the understanding of the so¬
cial organization of the Middle Ages to ascertain
the signification of these obligations, which are
the movable form of feudal property. It would
be wearisome to pass in review all of the feudal
obligations. I will confine myself to those which
have more especially roused the ire of the bour¬
geois writers, and try to show that if they were
maintained and aggravated by force, they had
been, at the origin, freely consented to.

Socage. — We have seen that the feudal baron,
when not a military chieftain installed by a con¬
queror, was, as a rule, a simple citizen, a member
of the community distinguished by no special
privileges from the rest of the villagers, his co-
equals ; like these he received his allotment in the
partition of the lands, and if his acres were culti-

102

FEUDAL PROPERTY

vated for him by the commoners this was done
that he might devote himself exclusively to their
defense. Haxthausen has observed that the Rus¬
sian lord continued to receive a quarter or a third
of the territory of the mir which was cultivated
by the villagers. Latruffe-Montmeylian says that
in France the proportion of the communal lands
allotted to the lord varied according to the nature
of the rights of the inhabitants. It amounted to
two-thirds when the peasants’ rights of common
extended to the demesne forests, and to a third
only when the rights were confined to the com¬
munal forest.* With the increase of the posses¬
sions of the barons and the monks, there followed
a lack of serfs to cultivate their lands, wherefore
they gave their arable en bordelage to peasant
collectivities, “eating from the same pan and off
the same loaf,” to use the language of the period.!
But, whether freemen or serfs, the tenants owed
a certain number of days of work to the feudal
lord, to till his field or house his corn.

As, at this period, production of commodities
and commerce did not as yet exist, the baron, no
less than the peasant, was obliged to produce all
that was requisite to supply his wants. In the
feudal habitation there existed workshops of

•Latruffe Montmeylian, “Du Droit des Communes sur les biens
Communaux.” Paris 1825. Montmeylian is one of the rare French
writers who had the courage to defend communal property against
the rapacity of the capitalists.

t Bordelage is a feudal system of tenure resembling metayage,
inasmuch as the rent for the land is paid not in money, but in a
portion of the produce. This tenure has been general in all feudal
Europe ; in France it lasted till the Revolution of 1789. Guflrard
found it flourishing in the 9th century, on the lands of the Abbey
of St. Germain des PrSs. Mr. L. Gomme, in his “Village Com¬
munities,” describes similar peasant associations in England, Scot¬
land, and Ireland.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

103

every description for the manufacture of arms,
farming implements, stuffs, clothing, etc., in
which the peasants and their wives were bound
to work for a certain number of days in the year.
The female laborer was under the direction of the
lady of the manor herself, and the workshops for
the same were termed genicioe. The monasteries
likewise possessed workshops for females.* These
workshops were rapidly turned into harems for
the lords and their retainers, and even into dens
of debauchery, in which the barons and the priests
debauched their female serfs and vassals. The
word geniciaria (woman working in the genicia)
became synonymous with prostitute. Our modern
brothels, as we see, have a religious and aristro-
cratic origin.

In the beginning the number of days of work
due to the baron by his vassal was insignificant ; in
some places it amounted to three days in the
year.t In France, the royal ordinances, in default
of a contract or custom, prescribed the number of
twelve days. Villein socage was harder ; but the
service was not to exceed three days a week, and
the serfs had, further, the enjoyment of a small
field which the lord had ceded to him and from
which he could not be expelled ; he had also a
share in the baron’s harvest and a right of pasture
in the forest and arable lands. Count Gasparin,
who was Minister of Agriculture under Louis
XVIII., in his treaty on Fermage, published in

•In the donation made in 728 by Count Eberhard to the monas¬
tery of Merbach, mention is made of 40 workmen employed in
the genicte.

t“Let the freeman enjoy liberty and go three times a year into
the count’s service,” ordains the Customary of Bigorre.

104

FEUDAL PROPERTY

1821, states his belief in the superiority, as re¬
gards the landed proprietor, of the system of
metayage to that of socage. But in the decline of
the feudal system the lords abused their power
to aggravate socage. “They had usurped such
authority,” says Jean Chenu, a writer of the be¬
ginning of the seventeenth century, “that they
exacted the labor of tillage, the gathering their
grapes and a thousand other services, with no bet¬
ter title than the peasants’ fear of being beaten
or eaten up by their men at arms.” When, in the
fourteenth century, peace was gradually estab¬
lished in the interior of Europe, every useful func¬
tion had been taken away from the feudal baron ;
and the nobles who succeeded the barons became
parasites and tyrants.

Bans de moisson. — It has been supposed that
the lord’s right of prescribing the days on which
to mow the fields, gather the grapes, reap the
corn, etc., was a purely feudal one, whereas its
origin is traceable to the period in which collective
property obtained. We have seen above that in
order to allow the arable lands to remain open to
the cattle of the village, the elders fixed the days
for the various harvests. This usage, established,
in the interests of the villagers, could only be
diverted from its true ends when the lord began
to traffic with his crops. He substituted his own
authority for that of the council of the elders, or
influenced their decisions so as to retard the
proclamation of the ban des moissons and be be¬
forehand with his own crops, and able, conse¬
quently, to sell them earlier and on better terms
than the produce of the communal fields.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

105

Banalite.* — The term is feudal; but the cus¬
tom which it designates is a communistic one. In
the village collectivities, certain offices, as afore
shown, were filled by individuals maintained at
the expense of the commune ; there was the village
herdsman, who drove the cattle to pasture ; there
were common forges, mills, slaughter-houses, and
animals to breed from, at the disposal of the com¬
munity. Private families, instead of baking their
own bread, sent it to be baked in the communal
oven ; a custom introduced from the economical
consideration of reducing the consumption of
fuel. The charge of watching over and attending
to these ovens was entrusted to the council of
elders ; thereafter to the lord, who, whenever it
was in his interest to do so, substituted his own
authority for that of the men commissioned by
the commune. A small tax was levied for this
right of usage of the common objects; in an
ordinance of 1223, of Guillaume Blanchemain,
Archbishop of Reims, it is said that “the prelate
shall be the proprietor of the common oven and
be entitled to the tribute of a loaf for every batch
of thirty-two loaves.” Boucher d’Argis cites
decrees of 1563 and 1673 fixing the right of
grinding in the common mills at a 16th and a
13th ; it is computed that, at present, the miller
deducts more than a tenth.t

This sort of institutions could exist only in the
absence of the production of commodities; they
hampered commerce and stood in the way of

•Boucher d’Argis. Code rural. Ch. xv. Des banalltfs.

tThe term signifies the compulsory usage of a thing belonging tc
the lord on condition of a due.

106

FEUDAL PROPERTY

private enterprises ; the revolutionary bourgeois
of France pronounced them tainted with feudal¬
ism, and abolished them in 1790.

The CHURCH, which eventually became the
exclusive property of the clergy, and is now closed
to the public out of the hours of worship, was
previously the joint property of the curate, the
baron, and the peasants. The chancel and altar
belonged to the lord and curate ; they were bound
to repair the woodwork, flooring, seats, etc., but
the nave belonged to the peasants, who used it
for their markets, communal assemblies, and
dancing parties, or as a storehouse for their crops
in case of need.* Mr. Thorold Rogers says that
in all cases the Church was the common hall of
the parish, and a fortress in time of danger, oc¬
cupying the site of the stockade which had been
built when the first settlers occupied the ground.t
The church bells, likewise, belonged to the peas¬
ants, who set them pealing to announce their
assemblies, or to apprise the villagers of fires or
hostile attacks. In the judicial archives of the
French provinces of the 17th and 18th centuries,
we find frequent mention of judgments rendered
against the bells for having warned the peasants
of the arrival of the collectors of the salt-tax ;
they were sentenced to be taken down and whip¬
ped by the hands of the executioner, “notwith-

•A synodical statute of 1529 prohibits — “To hold or suffer in
the church or cemeteries here any festivals, dances, games, merry¬
makings, representations, markets, and other illicit assemblies ; for
the church is ordained solely to serve the Lord, and not for such¬
like follies.” The naive believers of the Middle Ages saw no harm
in dancing, and representing their mysteries, in the honse of the
Lord.

tThorold Rogers, “Economical Interpretation of History.”

FEUDAL PROPERTY

107

standing that they had been consecrated and
blessed by a most solemn ceremony, in which the
oil of St. Chrism and myrrh and incense had been
used and many prayers recited.” The Church was
the house of God, elevated in the face of the
feudal manor, and the feudal peasants gathered
together under the shadow of it as around a
strong and tender mother.

The Tithe raised on the harvests of the peas¬
ants and the nobles in favor of the Church, was, in
the beginning, optional; just as it is in Ireland
at the present hour ; it was paid alike to the priest
and sorcerer. Agobard, an archbishop of the 9th
century, complains that the ecclesiastical tithe is
paid with far less regularity than that accorded
to the tempestarii, men endowed with the power
to lay storms and conjure up foul weather. But
from being optional the tithes became compulsory
in virtue of the feudal adage, “no land without its
tithes and burdens they were converted into a
seignorial right, and accorded to lay lords and
abbots, who re-sold them to other laymen. Dis¬
cretionary at the outset, the tithes became obliga¬
tory ; and, in the sequel, constituted an oppressive
impost that no performance of services any longer
authorized: even so is refined gold transmuted
into vile copper!

V

Just as the seignorial obligations, which became
onerous and iniquitious when the feudal barons
had ceased to afford protection to their vassals,
tenants, and serfs, had at one time been volun-

108

FEUDAL PROPERTY

tarily acquiesced in ; in like manner, the landed
property of the nobles, — at first a military post,
entrusted temporarily to a warrior, or, simply a
right to a share in the agrarian divisions, — grew
and expanded by dint of fraud and violence, and
generally at the expense of the communal lands.

Marx, in his admirable 27th chapter of “Capi¬
tal,” “on the expropriation of the agricultural
population from the land,” to which I refer the
reader, has described the prompt and brutal
fashion in which the Scotch and English lords
stole the possessions of the yeomen. “The great
encroachers,” as Harrison, the editor of “Holin-
shed’s Chronicle,” calls them, went to work ex¬
peditiously. In the 15th century the immense
majority of the population consisted of peasant
proprietors, whatever was the feudal title under
which their right of property was hidden. Macau¬
lay calculates that “the number of proprietors was
not less than 160,000, who, with their families,
must have made up more than one-seventh of the
whole nation. The average income of these small
landlords was estimated at between £60 and £70
a year.”

The chief period of eviction began with the
16th century. The great feudal lords drove the
peasantry by force from the land, to which they
had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and
seized upon the common lands. The rapid rise of
the Flemish wool manufacture, and the corre¬
sponding rise in the price of wool in England,
gave a direct impulse to these evictions. The
sheep drove out the men. “The shepe that were
wont to be so meke and tame,” says Thomas

FEUDAL PROPERTY

109

More, “and so small eaters, now, as I heare say,
be become so great devourers and so wylde, that
they eate up and swallow downe the very men
themselves.”*

In the last decade of the 17th century, the yeo¬
manry, the class of independent peasants, were
more numerous than the clan of farmers. They had
formed the backbone of Cromwell’s strength, and,
even according to the confession of Macaulay,
stood in favorable contrast to the drunken squires
and to their servants, the county clergy, who had
to marry their masters’ cast-off mistresses. About
1750 the yeomanry had disappeared, and so had
in the last decade of the 18th century the last
trace of the common land of the agricultural
laborer. In the 19th century the very memory
of the connection between the agricultural laborer
and the communal property has, of course, van¬
ished in England. The agricultural population
has received not a farthing of compensation for
the 3,511,770 acres of common land which, be¬
tween 1800 and 1831 were stolen from them by
parliamentary devices presented to the landlords
by the landlords.

The last process of wholesale expropriation of
the agricultural population from the soil is, finally,
the so-called clearing of estates, i. e., the sweeping
men off them. But what “clearing of estates”
really and properly signifies we learn only in the
promised land of modern romance, the Highlands
of Scotland. There the process is distinguished
by its systematic character, by the magnitude of
the scale on which it is carried out at one blow (in

•“Utopia, 9t translated by Robinson. Ed. Arber, London, 1869.

110

FEUDAL PROPERTY

Ireland, landlords have gone to the length of
sweeping away several villages at once ; in Scot¬
land areas as large as German principalities are
dealt with), finally by the peculiar form of prop¬
erty under which the embezzled lands were held.

The Highland Celts were organized in clans,
each of which was the owner of the land on which
it was settled. The representative of the clan, its
chief or “great man,” was only the titular owner
of this property, just as the Queen of England is
the titular owner of all the national soil. When
the English Government succeeded in suppress¬
ing the intestine wars of these “great men,” and
their constant incursions into the lowland plains,
the chiefs of the clans by no means gave up their
time-honored trade as robbers ; they only changed
its form. On their own authority they trans¬
formed their nominal right into a right of private
property, and as this brought them into collision
with their clansmen, they resolved to drive them
out by open force. “A king of England might
as well claim to drive his subjects into the sea,”
says Professor Newman. This revolution, which
began in Scotland after the last rising of the fol¬
lowers of the Pretender, can be followed through
its first phases in the writings of Sir James Steu-
art and James Anderson. As an example of the
method obtaining in the 19th century, the “clear¬
ing” made by the Duchess of Sutherland will
suffice here. This person, well instructed in ecorn
omy, resolved, on entering upon her government,
to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole
country, whose population had already been, by
earlier processes of a like kind, reduced to 15,000,

FEUDAL PROPERTY

111

into a sheep walk. From 1814 to 1820 these
15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were
systematically hunted and rooted out. All their
villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields
turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced
the eviction, and came to blows with the inhabit¬
ants. One’ old woman was burnt to death in
the flames of the hut which she refused to leave.
Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of
land that had from time immemorial belonged
to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabit¬
ants about 6,000 acres on the sea shore — two
acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this
time lain waste, and brought in no income to
their owners. The duchess, in the nobility of her
heart, actually went so far as to let these at an
average rent of 2s 6d per acre to the clansmen
who for centuries had shed their blood for her
family. The whole of the stolen clan-land she
divided into 29 great sheep farms, each inhabited
by a single family, for the most part imported
English farm servants. In the year 1835 the
15,000 Gaels were already replaced by 121,000
sheep. The remnant of the aborigines flung on
the sea shore tried to live by catching fish. They
became amphibious and lived, as an English au¬
thor says, half on land and half on water, and
withal only half on both.

The plunder of the State lands on a large scale
began with William of Orange. “These estates
were given away, sold at a ridiculous figure, or
even annexed to private estates by direct seizure.
All this happened without the slightest observa¬
tion of legal etiquette. The crown lands thus

112

FEUDAL PROPERTY

fraudulently appropriated, together with the rob¬
bery of the Church estates, as far as these had
not been lost again during the Republican Revo¬
lution, form the basis of the today princely do¬
mains of the English oligarchy. The bourgeois
capitalists favored the operation with the view,
among others, to promoting free trade in land,
extending the domain of modern agriculture on
the large farm system, and to increasing their
supply of the free agricultural proletarians ready
to hand.”

After the restoration of the Stuarts the landed
proprietors had carried by legal means an act
of usurpation, effected everywhere on the Con¬
tinent without any legal formality. In 1660 a
House of Commons, in which the landlords were
supreme, relieved their estates of all feudal dues,
then amounting to about one-half of the entire
revenues of the State. Military service, purvey¬
ance, aids, reliefs, premier seisin, wardship,
alienation, escheat, all disappeared in a day. In
their places were substituted excise duties. By
12 Charles II., c. 23 the great bulk of taxation
was for the first time transferred from the land
to the people, who have borne it ever since.

Landed property monopolized by the lords
was exempted from all dues towards the State,
as the lord had been discharged from all obliga¬
tions towards his vassals and tenants ; feudal
property had been changed into capitalist prop¬
erty.

This transformation was accomplished in Great
Britain in the midst of the most awful misery
of the peasant class ; the cultivators were ex-.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

113

pelled from the land by wholesale and made beg¬
gars. Their numbers became a social danger
against which the most barbarious measures were
taken. Legislation treated them as “voluntary”
criminals, and assumed that it depended on their
own will to go on working under the old condi¬
tions that no longer existed. In England this
legislation began under Henry VII.

Henry VIII., 1530: — “Beggars old and unable
to work receive a beggar’s license. On the other
hand, whipping and imprisonment for sturdy
vagabonds. They are to be tied to a cart tail
and whipped until the blood streams from their
bodies, then to swear an oath to go back to their
bithplace, or to where they have lived the last
three years, and to put themselves to labor.”
What a grim irony! In 27 Henry VIII. the for¬
mer statute is repeated, but strengthened with
new clauses. For the second arrest for vaga¬
bondage the whipping is to be repeated and half
the ear sliced off, but for the third relapse the
offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal
and enemy of the commonweal.”

Elizabeth, 1572: — Unlicensed beggars above
14 years of age are to be severely flogged and
branded on the left ear unless someone will take
them into service for two years ; in case of a
repetition of the offense, if they are over 18 they
are to be executed, unless someone will take them
into service for two years ; but for the third of¬
fense they are to be executed without mercy as
felons. Similar statutes, 18 Elizabeth, c. 13, and
another of 1597, James 1 : — Anyone wandering
about and begging is declared a rogue and a

114

FEUDAL PROPERTY

vagabond. Justices of the Peace in petty ses¬
sions are authorized to have them publicly
whipped, and for the first offence to imprison
them for six months, for the second two years.
Whilst in prison they are to be whipped as much
and as often as the Justices of the Peace think fit.
Incorrigible and dangerous rogues are to be
branded with an “R” on the left shoulder and set
to hard labor, and if they are caught begging
again, to be executed without mercy. — These
statutes, legally binding until the beginning of
the 18th century, were only repealed by 12 Ann,
c. 23.

Albeit not a single nation in Europe can boast
of having raised an aristocracy that accomplished
its work of monopolizing the land with anything
like the rapacity and ferociousness of Scotch and
English landlords, nevertheless in all countries
the peasant class has been in great part despoiled
of its territorial possessions ; and no means have
been left untried to bring about that most lauda¬
ble and lucrative consummation. Let me enu¬
merate a few of the devices that were resorted to
in France.

The feudal obligations, aids, and fines became
so excessive that the peasants commuted for
them by ceding to the lords a portion of the com¬
mon lands. These cessions of territory, greedily
hungered after by the feudal lords, would appear,
well-nigh all of them, to have been obtained by
the aid of artifice; the nobles corrupted a cer¬
tain number of villagers who managed to con¬
stitute in their own persons the general assembly
of the commune that voted the cessions ; hence

FEUDAL PROPERTY

115

we come across royal ordinances in France which
specify that for a cession of territory to be valid
it must be voted in an assembly of all of the in¬
habitants of the Commune.

The robbers of the communal lands did not
invariably employ Jesuitical means; they often
plundered with open brutality. In the 16th cen¬
tury, a period when the industrial and commer¬
cial bourgeoisie were rapidly developing, the
communal lands were coveted at one and the
same time by the nobles and by the bourgeois
speculators. The towns were enlarged to meet
the new requirements, and agriculture increased
its yield. The development of agriculture was
the great object of the speculators; under the
pretext of giving increased extension to the
arable lands, they induced the King to grant
them, by royal edict, the right of bringing under
culture the waste lands ; they hastened to include
in the category of waste lands the communal ter¬
ritories, and' proceeded to wrest them from the
peasants, who took up arms in their defense ; and
to vanquish whose resistance the speculators were
compelled to appeal for aid to the armed force
of the State.

The nobles had recourse to chicanery in order
to win possession of the village territories ; they
pretended that the lands owned by the peasants
did not correspond with their title deeds, which
was perfectly true ; they insisted on the verifica¬
tion of their claims, and confiscated what was
held by imperfect titles for their own benefit.
Upon occasion they proceeded- after a revolu¬
tionary fashion ; they destroyed* the title-deeds

116

FEUDAL PROPERTY

which they had got hold of, and so disabled the
peasants from establishing their rights to the
fields now left without an owner; whereupon in
virtue of the feudal adage, “pas de terre sans
seigneur ” the nobles seized upon the peasants’
territory. The autos da fe of proprietary titles,
held by the peasants during the revolution of
1789, were in retaliation of the suppression of
the peasant titles perpetrated by the nobility of
the 16th century.

The forests were grabbed up more brutally:
eschewing all legal formalities, the lords ad¬
judged to themselves the ownership of the woods
and underwood; they enclosed the forests and
forbade hunting, and abolished the right of
estovers ; the right of taking wood for fuel and
for the repairs of houses, fences, implements,
etc. These encroachments of the nobles on the
forest-lands, which were the common property
of the village, gave rise to terrible revolts of the
peasants. The jacqueries * which broke out in
the middle of the 14th century in the provinces of
the North and the center of France, were, in fact,
occasioned by the pretensions of the nobles to
forbid hunting and to interfere with the rights
of common in the forests, and the enjovment of
the rivers. Similar conflicts arose in Germany,
such as the famous revolt of the Saxons against
the Emperor Henry II., and that of the Suabian
peasants, who, in the time of Luther, took up
arms against the lords who debarred them from
the enjoyment of the forests. These peasant in-

•Jacqueries were Insurrections of the peasants ; a term deriTed
from the insulting epithet of Jacques Bonhomme applied to the
peasants by the nobles.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

117

surrections compelled the lords on several occa¬
sions to respect the ancient rights of common
which consisted in the right — limited only by the
peasant’s wants — to take wood and brushwood
for hedging, firing, and repairing his implements
(hedge-bote, fire-bote, and plough-bote) ; and in
the right of common pasture, or the right to send
his cows, horses, swine, and in some cases his
goats, to graze on the commons throughout the
year, the month of May alone excepted. So
firmly rooted were these rights that Lapoix de
Freminville declared, in 1760, that even in the
event of their abuse by the peasants they could
not be taken away from them: “for the right of
usage is perpetual, and being so, it is accorded
alike to the actual inhabitants and to those who
may come after them ; one cannot strip of an
acquired right even those who are yet unborn.”
But the revolutionary bourgeoisie of 1789 felt
none of the feudal legist’s respect for the peas¬
ants’ rights, and abolished them for the benefit
of the landed proprietor.

If the lords did, as a matter of fact, occasion¬
ally bow to the peasants’ rights of common, they
nevertheless constantly declared that these were
enjoyed on sufferance only; for they looked upon
themselves as the proprietors of the forests; just
as in later times they came to pretend to the
ownership of the vassals’ lands. In the Middle
Ages, when a free man, an alodial proprietor,
commended himself to a lord, sought the pro¬
tection, that is to say, of a powerful person, he
presented him with a clod of turf, and vowed
fealty and homage to him; yet he remained the

118

FEUDAL PROPERTY

master of his field. But in a number of provinces,
e. g., in Brittany, the lord considered himself
as the owner of the subsoil, while he recognized
the peasants’ rights to the superficies, i. e., the
crops, trees, buildings, etc. It is in virtue of
such legal fictions that during the bourgeois
period the nobles expropriated the peasants, de¬
scendants from the vassals, their ancestors. In
Scotland, the robbery of the peasant property
was perpetrated with such undisguised brutality
as to arouse the public indignation. Karl Marx,
in “Capital,” has related how the pious Duchess
of Sutherland dispossessed the peasants whose
fathers had built up the glory and the grandeur
of her house.

Until the bourgeois revolution of 1789 had
established private property in land, the landed
estates in France, including those of the nobility,
were subjected to rights of common, which
periodically took from them the character of pri¬
vate property. Once the harvest was secured,
the forests and arable land appropriated by the
nobility became common property again, and the
peasants were free to turn their cattle on them.
The vines were liable to a similar usage. Fran¬
cois de Neufchateau, in his “Agronomical Voy¬
age,” 1806, cites a Memoire, published in 1763,
by Societe d’ Economie Rurale en Berne, in which
it is complained that “after the vintage the vine¬
yards are laid open to the sheep, who grass there
*s on common lands.” But not only were the
landlords bound to permit the pasturing on their
lands of the village cattle ; they were moreover
forbidden to cultivate the soil according to their

FEUDAL PROPERTY

119

own methods ; they were constrained to conform
to the council of the elders, and required per¬
mission for the planting of their vines. A per¬
mission of this kind was refused a few years be¬
fore the French Revolution to Montesquieu,
greatly to the scandal of the political economists.
The proprietor was not allowed to leave his lands
uncultivated ; for a royal ordinance of Louis
XIV., enacted in 1693, and which but consecrated
an ancient usage, authorizes, — in the event of the
owner not cultivating his land himself, — “any
person to sow the same and to gather the fruits/’
Landed property, under the feudal system, was
anything but free ; not only was it burdened with
obligations, but it belonged to the family collec¬
tively ; the owner could not dispose of it at pleas¬
ure ; he was only the usufructuary possessor
whose mission it was to transmit his estates to his
descendants. The Church estates, likewise, bore
this character; they were the property of the
Church, the great Catholic family; the abbots,
monks, and priests who occupied the lands were
merely the administrators — the very faithless ad¬
ministrators — of them. In order to claim immun¬
ity from impositions, the French clergy, down to
the time of the Revolution, pretended that ecclesi¬
astical possessions ought not to be considered as
ordinary property ; that it was nobody’s property
( res nullius), because it was sacred, religious
property (res sacrae, res religiosae) . The revo¬
lutionary bourgeois took them at their word ;
they declared that the clergy were not the pro¬
prietors of the ecclesiastical estates, which be¬
longed to the Church. Now, the Greek word

120

FEUDAL PROPERTY

ecclesia, whence is derived eglise (church), sig¬
nifies the assembly, the reunion of all the faith¬
ful, which is the nation at large; wherefore the
estates of the Church are national property. By
the help of such subterfuge did the revolutionary
bourgeois, like Henry VIII. of England, lay
hands upon the Church property and distribute
amongst themselves the estates which belonged
to the poor.

It is these obligations of feudal property which
the political economists and Liberal historians
attack with special virulence; obligations which
were vestiges of the primitive communism that
secured a measure of well-being to the peasants,
and which they forfeited as soon as private prop¬
erty had superseded feudal property.

The bourgeois historians have invented the
legend of the Revolution of 1789 bestowing the
land upon the peasant, and freedom and happi¬
ness therewithal; whereas the plain truth is that
the great Revolution stripped him of his rights
of common and other secular rights of equal im¬
portance, delivering him up, defenseless, into the
clutches of the usurers and middlemen ; loading
him with taxes and forcing him to enter into
competition with the great landed proprietor,
equipped with capital and machinery. The great
bourgeois revolution was fraught with misery
and ruin for the peasant. According to the of¬
ficial census, there were, in 1857, 7,846,000
landed proprietors in France ; out of these 3,600,-
000 were so poor that they paid no direct con¬
tributions ; the number of proprietors, great or
small, was consequently reduced to 4,246,000. In

FEUDAL PROPERTY

121

1879 the various questions were ventilated of an
agricultural credit, of the application to the land¬
lords of the law of bankruptcy, of the simplifica¬
tion of the law of procedure in expropriations ;
and an inquiry was instituted to determine the
number of landed proprietors entitled to a share
in the famous credit. La Republiaite Francaise,
conducted by Gambetta, much interested in the
question, stated in its issue of 25th August, 1879,
that there existed in France only 2,826,000 landed
proprietors, offering the necessary guarantees en¬
titling them to a share in the credit. Thus from
1851 to 1879 the number of landed proprietors
deserving of the name had dwindled to 1,420,000.

To dissipate the errors and falsehoods which
the bourgeois writers have propagated respecting
the status of the cultivator during the Feudal
Period, and the benefits accruing to him from
the Revolution,, it suffices to compare the condi¬
tions of labor of the mediaeval cultivator with
those of the modern agricultural laborer. The
researches made by men of learning, during the
last 50 years, and the numerous documents dis¬
covered in different town and convents, enable
us to institute such a comparison.

L. Delisle, in his afore-cited study of the con¬
dition of the laboring classes in Normandy,
points out how the lord shared the fortune of the
laborer; for the rent was based upon the har¬
vest. For instance, the tenants of the monks
of St. Julien de Tours contributed the sixth
sheaf; in other parts the tenant contributed the
tenth sheaf; in still others the twelfth. Now, we
may rummage the bourgeois world and shall not

122

FEUDAL PROPERTY

find a landlord contenting himself with a twelfth
or even a sixth of the crops gathered on his es¬
tate. These conditions were not confined to a
single province, for in the south of France, at
Moissac, we meet with identical ones. Enact¬
ments of 1212 and 1214 show us the monks of
the Abbey of Moissac receiving only a third, a
fourth, or ew n as little as a tenth of the crops
harvested by the peasants who tilled their lands.
Lagreze-Fossat, who has studied these enact¬
ments, remarks that “a mutual agreement was
come to between the peasants and the monks,
and the contribution of the produce demanded
by the latter does not bear the character of an
impost ; it was debated beforehand, and freely
consented to.”*

In the 11th and 12th centuries, when the vine
was cultivated in Normandy, the landlords
claimed only one-half of the crops; the other
half belonged to the cultivators. Nowadays, in
the vine-growing countries, the peasant rarely
tastes the wine he produces.

Guerard has discovered and published the ac¬
count-book of the Abbey of St. Germain des
Pres ; that precious document, which dates from
the time of Charlemagne, enables us to study
the lives of the serfs and peasants of the 9th
century. . The abbey lands were cultivated, not
by individuals, but by collectivities of peasants,
composed of from 20 to 30 adult persons living
together, and the dues paid by them would ap-

*A. LagrSze Fossat, “Etudes Historiques sur Moissac ” 1872.
Moissac is a small town in the Department of Tam et Garonne of
considerable importance in the Middle Ages.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

123

pear ridiculously small to a modern farmer.

The abbey lands were divided into three cate¬
gories, the manses ingenuiles, the manses lidiles,
the manses serviles. At that period certain quali¬
ties were inherent in the land ; it was seignorial,
free, or servile ; Guerard calculates that the peas¬
ants paid in labor and in kind 5s. 6d. per acre
for the free lands, 8s. Id. for the tributary lands,
and 10s. for the servile lands. The cultivators
employed on the abbatial lands, and who, to
judge from their names, were mostly Germans,
attained, with their families, to the respectable
figure of 10,026. The condition of these peas¬
ants, considering their great numbers, must have
been the normal condition of the cultivators ; and
what laborer of our day, I ask, would not gladly
consent to barter his bourgeois landlord of the
19th for the monk of the 9th century, and hold
servile lands at the rate of 10s. per acre?*

The condition of the English laborer was no
worse. “There is one very unpleasing remark,”
says Hallam in his View of the State of Europe
during the Middle Ages, “which everyone who
attends to the subject of prices will be induced
to make, that the laboring classes, especially
those engaged in agriculture, were better pro¬
vided with the means of subsistence in the reign
of Edward III. or of Henry VI. than they are
at present. In the fourteenth century, Sir John
Cullum observes, a harvest man had fourpence
a day which enabled him in a week to buy a

‘“Polyptique de l'Abbfi Irminon on dgnombrement des manses’
serfs et revenus de l’Abbaye de St. Germain des Prgs sous le
regne de Charlemagne.” Publifi par GuGrard, 1844.

124

FEUDAL PROPERTY

comb of wheat; but to buy a comb of wheat a
man must now (1784) work ten or twelve days.
So under Henry VI., if meat was at a farthing-
and-a-half the pound, which, I suppose, was
about the truth, a laborer earning threepence a
day or eighteenpence in the week, could buy a
bushel of wheat at six shillings the quarter, and
twenty-four pounds of meat for his family. Sev-
eral Acts of Parliament regulate the wages that
might be paid to laborers of different kinds,
thus the Statute of Laborers in 1830 fixed the
wages of reapers during harvest at threepence a
day, without diet, equal to five shillings at pres-
ent; that of 23 H. VI., c. 12, in 1444® fixed the
reapers wages at fivepence, and those of com¬
mon workmen in building at threepence-half-
penny, equal to > 6s 8d. and 4s. 8d.; that of 11 H.
VIL, c. 22, in 1496, leaves the wages of laborers
in harvest as before, but rather increases those
of ordmary workmen. The yearly wages of a
cjyef hmd or. shepherd by the Act of 1444 were
£1 4s., equivalent to about £20; those of a
common servant in husbandry, 18s 4d with
meat and drink; they were somewha 'augmented
by the Statute of 1496. Yet, although toese
wages are regulated as a maximum by Acts of

taveS"'’ *h‘Ch ‘?ay naturally supposed to
have had a view rather towards diminishing than

enhancing the current rate, I am not full? con

vinced that they were not rather beyond it • pri-

1 ?,CCOUnts at leas* do not always correspond
with these statutable prices. And it is necessary

uaturaf to'so the “"certainty of employment
natural to so imperfect a state of husbandry.

FEUDAL PROPERTY

123

must have diminished the laborers’ means of sub¬
sistence. Extreme dearth, not more owing to
adverse seasons than to improvident consump¬
tion, was frequently endured. But after every
allowance of this kind, I should find it difficult
to resist the conclusion that, however the laborer
has derived benefit from the cheapness of manu¬
factured commodities and from many inventions
of common utility, he is much inferior in ability
to support a family to his ancestors three or four
centuries ago.”*

When the French Revolution broke out in 1789
feudal property had not as yet succeeded in en¬
franchising itself from the manifold obliga¬
tions which recalled its collectivist origin, and
which prevented it from being converted into
private property having the right to use and to
abuse.

•“The Student’s History of the Middle Ages.” Henry Hallam.
Adapted by William Smith. Part II., chap, is., pp. 566-7.

CHAPTER V

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

I

We have seen that landed property was origi¬
nally common to the entire tribe in the shape of
woodland, pasture, and even arable land; that
it was converted into collective property when
the clan broke up into the matriarchal or patri¬
archal families, and, lastly, into private property,
on the disintegration of the patriarchal family
and the constitution of the modern family, in¬
cluding the parents with their children, and a
few supernumeraries, say the grandparents or an
odd uncle or aunt who has failed in securing an
establishment of his or her own, and whose in¬
heritance is greedily coveted after.

The march of movable property has been a
different one; though, starting from the com¬
munist form, it far more rapidly arrived at the
private form ; even among savages, living in com¬
munity, the arms and ornaments are considered
as attached to the individual, and are frequently
interred with the corpses.*

•Immortality, that dreary idea, says Frederick Engels, so long
the torment of humanity, is an invention of the savages ; just as
they bestow a soul upon their bodies, or rather a double, who leaves
them during sleep and at death, so they attribute to animals, vege¬
tables, and even to inanimate objects, a soul capable of living out¬
side of them ; thus, on the burial of a warrior, they destroyed his
arms, and killed the animals that were to follow him into th«
other world.

126

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

127

The instruments of labor have at all times
been considered as the personal property of him
who wielded them ; during the periods of slavery
and serfdom, the tools and the soil were sur¬
rendered to the slave or serf who used them and
for whom they constituted a sort of property.
Individual appropriation of the instrument of
labor results from its personal character, and it
owes this character to the fact that it is small,
of little value, and capable of being manipulated
by a single individual; from this point of view
the implement of the artificer may be assimilated
to the field of the peasant cultivator, which is
small, of little value, and usable by a single in¬
dividual, that is to say, cultivable by himself and
the members of his family.

Landed property, as it evolved, prior to the
bourgeois property, on the one hand ran into
small peasant property and on the other into
feudal property. Agriculture was the prime motor
of this evolution. Commerce was the motor of the
evolution of the property of the instruments of
labor and industrial products, which, once it has
attained a certain degree of development, reacts,
as Marx has demonstrated, on landed property,
and accelerates its transformation into bourgeois
property.

II

In the collectivist village the peasants produce
all that they consume (bread, meat, flax, wool,
etc.), and the artificers (smiths, weavers, tailors,
etc.), are only admitted into it when their serv-

128

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

ices are required. They reside, as a rule, in the
outskirts of the village, and, after a certain term
of sojourn there, generally that of a year and a
day, they obtain the right of city ; are authorized
to send their cattle to graze on the common pas¬
ture, and are entitled to a share in the land. At
the outset there takes place no exchange of prod¬
ucts in these villages ; the handicraftsmen are
public functionaries in the service of the com¬
munity, and are paid by an annual tribute of pro¬
visions. They only work to order; the raw ma¬
terials are supplied them, and, wherever feasible,
they work in the houses of their customers.
When they ceased to be public officials, their
work was paid in kind or by service, in the same
way as the man-at-arms was paid for his work
of defense. This primitive form of industrial
labor persisted as long as the villages continued
to be small and retained the collectivist form of
landed property. The villages situated at the in¬
tersection of the roads, frequented by the cara¬
vans of traveling merchants, or near the mouths
of rivers, or the seaside, were the first to undergo
a change; a temporary market was etsablished
there for which the handicraftsman wrought.
Wherever the artificers found means to sell their
products they multiplied ; instead of finding them¬
selves repulsed or received indifferently, they
were sought and welcomed. The population of
the villages — transformed into towns and bor¬
oughs— composed of specialized handicraftsmen
practicing different crafts and standing in need
of one another’s services, came to establish a per¬
manent market where the inhabitants exchanged

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

129

their products or sold them, during the fairs, to
itinerant traders.

The character of industry then experiences a
change ; the artificer becomes independent of his
customer. He no longer waits for the latter to
supply him with the material he must work up;
he buys it, and keeps a stock of it on hand; he
ceases to work to order, and works only with a
view to sell. To his quality of producer is super-
added that of trader ; he buys the raw material,
and sells his finished work; he enlarges his shop,
and seeks the help of apprentices and journey¬
men, who work under his direction and side
by side with him, lodging in his house and eating
at his table. The fund he requires is of so modest
a description as hardly to deserve the name of
capital, in the sense in which Marx employs the
word, even although this fund be capital in em¬
bryo.

The increase of the population in the mediaeval
villages forbids the access of new-comers to the
communal lands, and precludes their sharing in
the agrarian divisions. The village lands re¬
mained the exclusive property of the original in¬
habitants and their descendants, who constituted
a sort of municipal aristocracy, while, in the
country, the exigencies of defense called into life
the feudal aristocracy. The urban aristocracy
has survived in certain towns of democratic
Switzerland. In the Alsatia of our day these
urban aristocrats have become great manufac¬
turers.

By way of resisting the despotism of the aristo¬
crats of the towns, who monopolized the land

130

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

and power, the handicraftsmen organized guilds,
which, in the beginning, were open to all the artifi¬
cers of the locality without distinction. These
guilds not only defended the craftsmen against
the municipal aristocrats, but protected them
against their mutual competition. The market
in which they sold their wares acquired a capital
importance ; as it was restricted to the inhabitants
of the town and the itinerant hawkers of the fairs,
the corporations were bound to see that the mar¬
ket was not overstocked with goods. The cor¬
porations now became close, and the number of
persons admitted into them, and at liberty, con¬
sequently, to open a shop in the town, was lim¬
ited, as was also the number of journeymen the
masters might employ and wares they might turn
out. In order to facilitate the quantity of and to
render effective the supervision of the syndics of
the corporations, the craftsmasters were obliged
to work with open doors and windows, and some¬
times in the streets. Each guild possessed its
specialty, to which its members were strictly
bound to adhere — e.g., the bootmakers were re¬
stricted to the making of new boots, the repair¬
ing and soling of old boots was prohibited, as
belonging of right to the corporation of cobblers.

The right of sale was no less jealously pro¬
tected than that of production; at the fairs the
seller was only allowed to accost the buyer as he
passed in front of the stall ; once he had stepped
beyond it, the seller had forfeited the right to
call him back, or to offer him goods for sale, for
he now pertained to the owner of the neighbor¬
ing stall. These multiplex and minute regula-

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

131

tions attest the importance already acquired by
the market, the expansion of which was, at a later
date, to transform the mode of production and
the correlative social relations.

In handicraft production lay this inherent con¬
tradiction : if the handicraftsman was a synthetic
laborer, combining in his person the intellectual
and manual functions of his handicraft, produc¬
tion and the instruments of production were, on
the contrary, scattered over the land. Every
province, every borough and town, every seign¬
iorial domain and peasant farmstead, produced
the food and other necessaries of life required by
its inhabitants, selling only what was superfluous,
and buying only a few articles of luxury. As
they imported none of the articles of consump¬
tion, the mediaeval towns and provinces were
economically independent, and, as a consequence,
able to live in a state of isolation ; they formed
so many distinct petty states, habitually at war
with one another.

The economic theory which corresponded to
this dispersion of production tended to promote
their independence. The agriculturists, who
were the economic theoricians of the feudal
epoch, advised the landed proprietor to produce
all on his own domain, so as to have nothing to
purchase outside its limits, and we have seen that
in the manors of the feudal lords there existed
workshops for manufacturing all and everything,
not excepting arms.

That theory remained valid long after the phe¬
nomena which had given rise to it had disap-

132

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

peared. When, in the 16th century, the silk in¬
dustry was imported into France from Italy, the
royal policy, instead of concentrating it in the
locality in which it had a chance of success, dis¬
seminated it over the provinces. Attempts were
made to rear the silk-worm in countries in which
it was difficult if not impossible to cultivate the
mulberry tree, on the leaves of which it feeds.
During the Revolution of 1789 it was sought to
acclimatize the cotton plant, to avoid having to
buy it abroad ; and it was the desire to shake off
the tribute paid to the colonies by the purchase
of the sugar-cane which led to the discovery of
the saccharine properties of the beet-root.

When the warfare between castle and castle
abated, owing to the disappearance of the van¬
quished, whose lands were engrossed by the vic¬
tor, and there ensued a greater security of the
highways, commercial intercourse between the
different provinces became possible and great
centers of handicraft production sprang up. The
city of Ghent, which manufactured cloths from
wool imported chiefly from England, possessed
in the 14th century a population of upwards of
half a million inhabitants. The development of
commerce shook the social organization of the
feudal city.

In the towns which prospered industrially, the
guild-masters of handicrafts developed into close
corporations, the freedom of which was obtain¬
able only by the privilege of birth, money or
royal favor, or else — unless one chanced to be a
son or relation of a guild-master — by serving a

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

133

long term of apprenticeship ; it was necessary to
pay for learning the handicraft, for the right of
exercising it, and again on being made free of
the trade. The guild-masters excluded a num¬
ber of artificers who no longer worked on their
own account, but in the workshops of their mas¬
ters. Heretofore the handicraftsman could hope
to become a master and a shopkeeper in his turn ;
but in proportion as commerce and industry were
developed the men lost all prospect of this ; shut
out from the incorporated trades, and at enmity
with the masters who employed them, they
formed vast associations of journeymen which
were at once national and international, whereas
the guilds of the masters were essentially local.
The masters, enriched by the development of
production, allied themselves with the municipal
aristocrats in order to cope with the apprentices
and journeymen, who on several occasions were
set on and supported by the feudal nobility, jeal¬
ous of the growing municipal aristocracy. All
the industrial towns of the Middle Ages were
stained with blood by the conflicts between jour¬
neymen and craftsmasters.

The discovery of the passage of the Indies by
rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and that of
America, which date from the end of the 15th
century, by bringing the gold of America into
the European market, and by introducing trans¬
oceanic commerce, depreciated the value of land¬
ed property, gave a decisive impulse to the rising
bourgeois production in the cities of the Medi¬
terranean, the cities of the Low Countries, and

134

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

the Hanseatic League, and opened the era of
modern revolution.*

The countries newly discovered in India and
America were put to plunder, and turned into
markets for the industrial and agricultural prod¬
ucts of Europe. England exported corn to
America; 1’ Auvergne cheese,, wine, etc.

The creation of the colonial market and the
importation of American gold furthered, the de¬
velopment of manfacturing industry. Private in¬
dividuals were enabled to accumulate the funds
required for the establishment of manufactories,
which in the beginning were simply workshops
of artificers, only distinguished from these by the
greater number of workmen employed, and the
larger quantity of commodities manufactured.
As these workshops infringed all the regulations
of the guilds, and encroached on the privileges
of the masters, they could not be established in
the towns, but had to be set up in the suburbs,
the country or the maritime cities which, newly
founded, possessed neither municipal aristocracy
nor incorporated trades. In London and Paris,
it was outside the city walls, in Westminster,
Southwark, and the Fauborg St. Antoine that the

•It is the habit to describe as revolutionary political events of a
tumultuous and explosive character, while vastly less importance is
attached to economic events of far greater revolutionary influence
upon the march of society and the conditions of human existence.
The manners and customs of the peasant have subsisted unmodified
throughout many centuries in despite of wars, changes of frontiers,
and social and political vicissitudes. An English anthropologist,
Mr. Farrer, has remarked that the superstitions of the peasant
singularly resemble those of the savage. Country people have only
of quite recent years been roused by the establishment of railways.
In our day economic phenomena exert such preponderating influence
that in France changes of government occur, to effect which there
is no need to make the cannon speak ; it is enough if the Deputies
to the Chambers speak.

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

135

manufactories were created. They were estab¬
lished by merchants enriched by the colonial
trade, and not by the guild-masters, bound in the
chains of routine, and fettered by corporative
bonds. In the present day we see railways con¬
structed and directed, not by the masters of stage¬
coach companies, but by financial men.

Manufacture, which struck at the corporations,
and ruined the guild-masters of handicrafts, was
equally prejudicial to the artificer, whom it appar¬
ently benefited by affording a greater regularity
and a greater quantity of labor and a higher sal¬
ary. Division of labor was introduced into the
manufactories ; all the operations of a trade were
disjoined and isolated; the manufacture of a pin,
for example, was decomposed into some twenty
different operations, performed by an equal num¬
ber of specialized laborers. The artificer who,
heretofore, had been familiar with all the proc¬
esses of his craft, and each of which he accom¬
plished in turn, became now a detail laborer, con¬
demned for life to execute a single operation.

The impulsion given to commerce and to pro¬
duction hastened the expansion of the towns,
which were compelled to burst their bounds and
spread over the adjoining fields. An economical
difficulty then arose : it became necessary to find
the means of existence for these newly-created
populations.

During the primitive collectivist period, the
town had not come to exist, even as the resi¬
dence of the military chief, exercising royal
power. The Merovingian kings, like the Indian
princes, traveled with a more or less numerous

136

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

retinue of men-at-arms and retainers, followed
by artificers of divers trades. The spot on which
they camped became a temporary city : they sub¬
sisted on the fees and donations of the surround¬
ing country. The absence of roads and the diffi¬
culty of communication precluded all permanent
conglomeration of persons; whom there was no
means of supporting. The feudal cities, depend¬
ent on the agricultural produce of the neighbor¬
ing localities for their means of subsistence, were
necessarily bound to restrict themselves to a lim¬
ited number of inhabitants. So long as the ab¬
sence of roads or the insecurity of such as ex¬
isted, rendered all commercial intercourse be¬
tween the towns impossible or difficult, there
was no question of guarding against the expor¬
tation of the means of subsistence. But so soon
as the means of communication began to be im¬
proved, and as men began to transport grain
from one province to the other, all the towns
and provinces took measures for prohibiting the
exportation of corn from their territories, and
preventing it being monopolized. In all the Euro¬
pean towns we meet with regulations for the sale
of cereals in the markets at stated times ; a maxi¬
mum price was fixed, and the quantity allowed
to be purchased was determined ; the proprietors,
under penalty of confiscation, were prohibited
from garnering corn for more than two years ;
it was, furthermore, forbidden to buy the stand¬
ing corn or that already housed. The extension
of the towns, and the difficulty of procuring
provisions outside their own territories, turned
every bad harvest year into a year of dearth or

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

137

famine. The paramount concern of the munici¬
pal authorities was to prevent famines ; they or¬
dained the storing of provisions capable of sup-
plying the town for at least three months, and
saw to it that a sufficient quantity of land was
annually sown with corn. An edict of 1577, in
France, restricted the planting of vineyards,
which became, yearly, more important, and re¬
quired that for every portion of land planted
with vines a double portion be devoted to corn.

In order to meet the new requirements it was
necessary that agriculture should be developed;
new lands were brought under culture, wood¬
lands were deforested and marshlands reclaimed,
while the cornfields were enlarged. In years of
good harvests the corn was so abundant that the
price of it ceased to be remunerative; it became
urgent to create fresh markets. In France the
circulation ot corn was permitted between the
provinces, and also the exportation of it to Eng¬
land and the Colonies. These economic liberties
were but short-lived, for no sooner had corn at¬
tained a certain price in a locality that its expor¬
tation was prohibited. From 1669 to 1683, dur¬
ing a period of fourteen years, the exportation
of corn was permitted on nine occasions and
prohibited during six years.

These regulations were powerless to prevent
local famines ; nay, it happened that they intensi¬
fied the same by prohibiting the exportation of
corn from a province in which it was super¬
abundant; the towns confiscated corn in its tran¬
sit through their territories, whenever fearful of
competition or threatened with famine. Colbert

138

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

was constrained to employ force to get 2,500
sacks of corn, which the Parliament of Bordeaux
sought to retain, expedited to Paris. It would
happen that a town suffered from famine, whilst
at a distance of some fifty miles the wheat sup¬
ply was abundant. The circulation of wine, wool,
etc., was subjected to similar restraint; seaports
like Bordeaux and Marseilles, in order to com¬
mand a better sale for their own wines, pre¬
vented the shipment of the wines of the neigh¬
boring provinces. Prior to the Revolution of
1789, the last royal ministers endeavored to show
the danger and uselessness of these regulations ;
they caused them to be temporarily suspended,
but were always in the last instance compelled
to re-establish them. It required a revolution to
abolish them and to strip the peasants of their
privileges, which burdened landed property and
hampered the development of modern agricul¬
ture, just as the priveleges of the corporations
had shackled the development of industry.

The incorporated trades that opposed the es¬
tablishment of manufactures in their towns stood
in fear, above all things, of innovations ; in or¬
der to maintain the industrial equality of the
masters of handicrafts, and to prevent the one
from enjoying an advantage not shared by the
other, the introduction of new processes and im¬
provements of any kind were prohibited. Ar-
gand, the inventor of a lamp with a double air-
current, which tripled the lighting capacity of
the oil, was, in the 18th century, had before the
Parliament of Paris, by the corporation of tin-
workers, who claimed the exclusive right of

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

139

manufacturing lamps. It was due to the influ¬
ence of the royal courtesans, Mesdames Pompa¬
dour, Du Barry, and Marie Antoinette that
printed calicoes were allowed to be sold ; for the
chambers of commerce of Rouen, Lyons, and
Amiens had protested energetically, predicting
the ruin of industry and a cataclysm in France
if the manufacture of these cottons was author¬
ized.

The feudal fetters which impeded the develop¬
ment of agriculture and industry once broken,
bourgeois property was free to implant itself and
begin its evolution.

The landlord obtained the right of enclosing
his fields ; the people’s right of pasture after the
harvest was abolished. This right of enclosure
was of supreme importance, for, anterior to it,
the landlord could apply no other methods of
culture than those employed by the commoners
in general, on pain of seeing his harvests prowled
on by their cattle. This right of enclosure was,
too, the right most loudly clamored for in France
in the 18th century. The common lands, where-
ever it was possible, were divided ; were given
away, that is, to the bourgeois ; for the inhabit¬
ants of the community to whom they were ap¬
portioned sold them at a nominal price ; this
partition of the land, for which a multiplicity of
philanthropical and moral reasons has been ad¬
duced, was but a means of preventing the small
peasant from possessing cattle, and of depriv¬
ing him of his resources in order to turn him into
a wage-laborer. The church property, which
ought to have been restituted to the poor, to

140

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

whom it belonged, was plundered with the ut¬
most brutality and cynicism in England as well
as in France ; for everywhere the bourgeois is
animated by the same thievish instincts.

Leopold Delisle, in the preface of his history
of the agricultural classes of the Middle Ages,
observes : “A significant fact is the stationary
condition of our agriculture for the last five cen¬
turies, from the 10th to the 15th. Almost all of
the practices described in our old records hold
good to this day among our laborers ; to such
an extent that a 13th century peasant who should
visit one of our small farms, would experience
but little surprise.” But this same 13th century
peasant would feel lost in one of the great mod¬
ern farms on which the methods of mechanical
agriculture are applied.

The most improved methods of culture have
transformed agricultural products and increased
the produce. Modern agriculture is ruinous ; it
exhausts the soil, alike by the abundance of the
crops and their exportation abroad. Their con¬
sumption in the towns interferes with the cir¬
culation of matter which formerly went on be¬
tween the soil and animals and man, in the form
of meat, grain, and fruit, etc., consumed by him,
and back from man and beast to the soil, in the
shape of excrements. So long as the consump¬
tion of the harvest took place upon the spot the
circulation was complete; to remedy the present
defective circulation it has become’ necessary to
restore the fertility of the soil by artificial means
— by gorging it with manures brought from afar,
from South America and the Napoleonic battle-

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

141

fields, and with artificial and chemical manures.

Modern agriculture demands a vast expendi¬
ture of labor; but in proportion as more labor
was required, in the same proportion the indus¬
trial towns drew off the laborers and depopulat¬
ed the country. “There is a lack of agricultural
hands,” has been the general cry for the last
eighty years ; and it is this dearth of agricultural
laborers which has furnished the necessary in¬
citement for the procurement of the means of la¬
bor in abundance. The application of machinery
to agricultural labor became an imperative neces¬
sity ; but machinery can only be applied on great
farms ; wherefore the concentration of land was
a pre-requisite for the application of machinery
and the introduction of scientific agriculture.

In 1857 M. Leonce de Lavergne cited, by way
of example, a farm of the Department of l’Oise
on which 1,250 acres of beet-root were cultivated,
and 8,250 bushels of wheat were gathered.
“There is nothing more colossal to be met with
in England,” he exclaimed exultingly.*

But how insignificant do these colossal farms
appear when compared with the Bonanza farms
of the New World.

Since 1874 an American cultivator, Mr. Dal-
rymple, whose name has obtained a world-wide
celebrity, has directed the operations of six
farms, of an area of 75,000 acres, belonging to
a financial company. He divided these farms
into sections of 2,000 acres, subdivided into three
lots of 650 acres. These 75,000 acres are cul¬
tivated by a regiment of 600 laborers, under a

•Lfionce de Lavergne, “L’ Agriculture et la Population.” Parit.

142

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

military discipline. At harvest time the central
administration engages from 500 to 600 supple¬
mentary laborers, and distributes them among
the different sections. As soon as the autumn
operations are ended the men are discharged,
with the exception of the foreman and 110 men
per section. In certain farms of Dakota and
Minnesota the mules and horses do not winter
on the field of operation ; once the ground is
broken they are sent southward and return only
in the following spring. Mounted mechanicians
accompany the plows, sowing machines, etc.,
ready at a moment’s notice to repair the ma¬
chinery out of order. The grain is conveyed
to the threshing machines, which are in operation
night and day; it is threshed and winnowed and
sacked automatically, and despatched to the rail¬
roads which adjoin the farms, and from thence
to Duluth or Buffalo. Every year Mr. Dal-
rymple increases the acreage under culture by
5,000 acres; in 1880 it amounted to 25,000 acres.

At the same time that the bourgeoisie of Eu¬
rope stripped the peasants of the communal lands
and feudal privileges, it imposed upon them trib¬
utes of blood and money; it left them at the
mercy of the usurers, who converted them into
nominal proprietors, exposed to the competition
of the great land owners and farmers of America
and India. These and other causes combined to
accelerate the expropriation of the peasant and
his conversion into a proletarian. In America,
where financial agriculture is carried to the high¬
est pitch of perfection, we meet also with the
most highly developed agricultural proletariat.

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

143

The cultivators of the corn-growing States of
the Union may be classed under four great cate¬
gories : 1, the day laborers or agricultural

proletarians ; 2, the small farmers (peasant pro¬
prietors and metayers ) ; 3, proprietors who di¬
rect the cultivation of their land; 4, great finan¬
cial farmers of whom, in Europe, the only coun¬
terparts are to be found in different parts of
Roumania and in the south of Russia.

The great majority of the cultivators is com¬
posed of proletarians, who do not possess an
inch of land or a hut of mud ; they do not own
the bed on which they lie or the spoon they eat
with ; they realize the ideal of men stripped of
all private property save that which they directly
appropriate in the shape of food or clothing.
They have no fixed abode in the fields they cul¬
tivate, and which they abandon as soon as the
work is done. The managers of the financial
farms recruit the laborers everywhere ; in the
villages and large towns the latter are hired by
the day, week or month. The men are engaged
for the agricultural campaign, placed under the
direction of overlookers and foremen and con¬
veyed to the farms ; they are lodged and fed and
supplied with medicine and paid a wage. They
are drilled and formed into regular agricultural
regiments, and subjected to a military discipline.
They rise, feed, and go to bed at prescribed
hours; throughout the week spirits are prohibit¬
ed ; on Sundays the men are free to go and
drink at the neighboring ale-houses. When the
work is performed in autumn they are dis¬
charged; during the winter months only a small
number of men is kept on at the farms to tend

144

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

the cattle and to take care of the farm imple¬
ments. The rest return to the towns and village*
to practice whatever trade they can put them¬
selves to.

The transformation of landed property and of
its mode of culture was necessitated by the
transformation undergone by industrial and
financial property. The country, in order to
supply the men and money required by industry
for its workshops and colossal enterprises (rail¬
ways, tunnels, etc.), unparalleled since the giant
achievements of the period of primitive com¬
munism, was drained of its population, and the
hiding-places in which the peasants had depos¬
ited their savings were cleared out.

At previous epochs the citizens, with the ex¬
ception of an infinitesimal minority of noblemen,
priests, and artificers, satisfied all their wants by
cultivating the land; in the bourgeois world an
ever-increasing mass of citizens is divorced from
agricultural labor, and engaged in industrial and
commercial pursuits, and dependent for their
means of subsistence on the population employed
in tilling the soil.

Ill

A mediaeval village was an economic unit, be¬
cause within its limits all the handicrafts were
practiced which the villagers required. Capital¬
ist production begins by destroying this economic
unit; it dissociates the handicrafts and isolates
them, assigning to special centers the exercise
of distinct crafts. A town or province no longer
produces all the articles required by its inhabit-

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

145

ants ; it relies upon other towns or provinces for
the manufacture of special goods. The silk
manufactures that it had been sought to disperse
over France were, by the end of the last century,
almost wholly concentrated in Lyons and its en¬
virons. The textile manufactures of wool, flax,
and cotton are centralized in certain districts,
whilst the production of iron, beetroot-sugar, etc.,
is confined to others.

The ancient communal and provincial units
have been destroyed, and in their place units of
a different sort have been constituted. The an¬
cient units were complex; they were formed by
the conglomeration, in a township or province,
of all the industries required by it; whereas the
modem economic units are simple. They are
constituted each by a single industry — iron or
sugar here, cotton or leather yonder. A capi¬
talistic nation, like France, is not subdivided into
provinces or departments in harmony with its
geographical configuration and historical tradi¬
tions, but is divided into simple economic units :
into cotton districts or wine districts, corn-grow¬
ing or sugar-growing regions, carboniferous or
silk producing centers. All of these industrial
units are interdependent from their reciprocal
wants, no one industry center being capable, like
the mediaeval cities, of subsisting a month or even
a week without the support of other centers. If,
for example, the town of Rouen supplies the
whole of France with cotton goods, she imports
her corn from La Beauce, her cattle from the
north, her coals from the Loire, her oil from
Marseilles, and so forth. A capitalistic nation is

146

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

a gigantic workshop, and every specialty of social
production is executed in special centers, situated
at great distances from one another but nar¬
rowly knit together by reciprocal wants. The
political autonomy of the mediaeval townships
has become an impossibility; the correlation of
economic wants serves as a basis for the political
unity of the nation. Capitalist production, which
has destroyed the local and provincial unity of
handicraft production, is about to destroy the
national unity of its own creation and to replace
it by a vaster, an international unity.

England, that was the first nation to apply
machinery, had manifested the pretension of con¬
straining the rest of the nations to become ex¬
clusively agricultural countries, reserving for
herself the industrial role. Lancashire was to
weave all the cotton produced by the Indies and
the United States. This premature attempt at
an international industrial monopolization has
miscarried. America, at the present day, manu¬
factures cotton goods in excess of her require¬
ments, and India, whose cotton industry had
been ruined by England, has taken to weaving
by machinery. Sixteen years ago the consump¬
tion of cotton by the manufactories of India
amounted to 87,000 bales ; in 1885 the consump¬
tion of cotton amounted to 585,000 bales.*

India was the cradle of the cotton industry;
calicoes first came from Calcutta, and muslin
from Mosul ; ere long the Indian cottons, manu¬
factured in the proximity of the cotton fields,
will once again invade the European markets

•Thomas Ellison, “The Cotton Trade of Great Britain.” 1886.

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

147

and, in their turn, ruin the industry of Manches¬
ter and the cotton centers of the Continent. The
cotton goods of India and the United States will
supplant those of Rouen and Manchester. A
Yankee merchant, impressed by the impending
fate of the Lancashire manufacturers, charitably
advised them to transport their machinery to
Louisiana, where they would have the raw ma¬
terial close at hand, and so save the expense of
its conveyance. The international displacement
of an industry goes on under our eyes ; the manu¬
factories are drawn into the sphere of the agri¬
cultural centers which produce the raw material.
But before they had become industrial centers
India and the United States had held Europe in
subjection, thanks to their agricultural produc¬
tion. The War of Secession of the United
States, from 1861 to 1865, threw out of work
the weavers of France and England; and exag¬
gerated the cultivation of cotton, “the golden
plant,” in Egypt, whilst it ruined the fellahs and
delivered up Egyptian finance into the hands of
Rothschild and other cosmopolitan bankers.

The wheat production is in the act of being
centralized in certain parts of the world. Eng¬
land, that in the 17th century produced corn
sufficient for her home consumption, with a sur¬
plus for exportation, at the present moment im¬
ports from America, Australia, and India more
than one-half of the wheat she consumes. The
nations of Europe today are in a state of eco¬
nomic dependence on one another, and on the
half-civilized countries. This international eco¬
nomic interdependence is on the increase, and

148

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

will, in times to come, form the basis of the po¬
litical unity of human kind, a unity which will
be founded on the ruins of the existing national
unities.

IV

Capitalist production has advanced from the
local and provincial political units to the national
political units by creating industrial organisms
which could not have been constituted but for
the local concentration of production and the de¬
composition of the process of production. Thus,
while manufacturing production agglomerated
the laborers and the means of production in its
workshops, it introduced the division of labor
which decomposed the instrument of labor and
condemned the laborer to the lifelong execution
of a single operation. The implements of the
artificer were few and simple, whereas those of
the industrial manufacturer are complex and mul¬
tifarious. In proportion as the fractional laborer
became unfit for all save a single operation, the
instrument of labor — developing on the same
lines — was differentiated and became specialized.
In certain manufactories from four to five hun¬
dred hammers of different shapes and weights
were employed, each hammer serving exclusively
to execute a special operation. The great me¬
chanical industry has undone the work of manu¬
facture ; it has torn the instruments of labor out
of the hands of the detail laborer, and has an¬
nexed them to a framework of steel and iron,
which is, so to say, the skeleton of the machine
tool, while the instruments annexed to it are its

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

149

organs. The machine tool is a mechanical syn¬
thesis.

But capitalist production has produced yet an¬
other synthesis.

In domestic industry there is an economic unit ;
the same family transforms the raw material
(wool, flax, etc.), which it has produced; this
unit has been decomposed. Already in the most
primitive communities we see certain industries
fall to the lot of certain individuals, who are
professional wheelwrights, smiths, weavers, or
tailors, etc.; later on, in order to obtain an eco¬
nomic unit, we have no longer to consider an
isolated family but the entire village or burgh.
With the development of commerce and the
progress of industry, these distinctive industries
were multiplied and became specialties devolving
upon certain artificers, grouped in corporations.

It is on the basis of the specialization of in¬
dustries in the cities that capitalist production
was built up. It commenced by establishing
weavers’, dyers’, wheelwrights’, and cabinet
makers’ workshops, in the interior of which the
division of labor and the machine accomplished
their revolutions. But these manufactures, which
subsequently were converted into colossal fac¬
tories, remained, like the small artificer’s work¬
shop, restricted to a special industrial process,
or to the production of a commodity and its
varieties ; weavers did nothing but weave and
spinners did nothing but spin. But these spe¬
cialized manufactories cease to be isolated; a
number of them come to be agglomerated and
are attached to a factory. Dyeworks, print-

150

bourgeois property

works, etc., establish themselves in the neig
borhood of mechanical weaving and spinning
industries, so that under one and the same cap¬
italistic administration the raw material goes
through the entire series of its industrial trans¬
formations. And this conglomeration has not
been confined to complementary industries, but
has taken place in quite independent industries.
This centralization does not necessarily occur in
one and the same spot ; frequently the different
factories are set up in different localities, situated
at a considerable distance from one another, but
under the control of the same administration.

The National Banks, such as the Banks of
England and France, are types of these complex
industrial organizations which spread all over
the land. A national bank possesses paper mills
for the manufacture of the paper for its bank¬
notes ; printing presses and engravers’ workshops
for printing and engraving the same; and pho¬
tographic apparatus for the detecting of forger¬
ies ; it founds hundreds of branch offices in com¬
mercial and industrial centers ; enters into
connection with town and country bankers . at
home, as well as the national bankers of foreign
countries. The central bank becomes, so to say,
the heart of the financial system of the country;
and so ingeniously organized is the system that
the pulsations of the national bank — the rise or
fall of its rate of discount — find an echo in the
remotest villages of the country, and even react
on the money markets of foreign nations.

Another striking type is the Times newspaper.
This industrial organism employs a legion of

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

151

correspondents, scattered over the four quarters
of the globe; telegraph wires connect it with the
great capitals of Europe ; it manufactures its
own paper, founds its own type, and employs a
set of mechanicians to superintend and repair
its machinery ; it composes, stereotypes, and pub¬
lishes its sixteen large pages of printed matter,
and possesses horses and carts for distributing
the papers to other retail vendors. All that it
still wants are alfa-fields in Africa to supply the
raw material for the paper, and these it will, in
good time, no doubt, contrive to acquire. There
will come a day when American and Indian
manufacturers will adjoin to their factories fields
for the cultivation of the cotton plant and work¬
shops for the working up of their calicoes into
articles of clothing. Scotch woolen manufactur¬
ers have already opened establishments in Lon¬
don in which they sell in the shape of ready-made
garments the woolen goods they have manufac¬
tured. Capitalistic industry is in the act of re¬
constituting the economic unit of domestic pro¬
duction ; heretofore the same peasant family pro¬
duced the raw material which it wrought up into
industrial products ; one and the same capitalistic
administration will by-and-by undertake to pro¬
duce the raw material, transform it into indus¬
trial products, and sell these to the customer.

By means of the division of labor, capitalist
production began by destroying the unit of labor
represented by the handicraftsman ; thereupon it
proceeded to reconstitute that unit of labor, no
longer represented by the laborer, but by “the
iron man,” the machine. At present it tends to

152

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

constitute giant organisms of production, com¬
posed of industries the most diverse and oppo¬
site; the special industries which are, so to say,
the organs of these monsters, may exist apart, at
enormous distances from one another, and be
divided by political frontiers and geographical
obstacles (mountains, rivers, or seas). These in¬
ternational ogres of labor consume heat, light,
electricity, and other natural forces, as well as
the brain power and muscular power of man.

Such is the economic mould in which the hu¬
man material of the nineteenth century is run.

V

Simultaneously with the extension of the manu¬
facturing system and the factories, property, un¬
der the form of gold and silver, underwent a
change. At the outset, these two metals, even
when stamped and converted into money, were
property of an essentially private character ; their
owner hoarded them or used them for personal
ornament. In India and the countries of the
East the latter is still one of the uses they are
chiefly put to. They but rarely served as a
means of exchange, the products themselves be¬
ing ordinarily bartered. The feudal kings could
utter false coin, or debase the coin, without
very materially injuring the commercial trans¬
actions of their subjects. But when, with the
advent of the commercial period, gold and silver
became the representative signs of value, the
standard measure of all commodities, these met¬
als acquired the right to breed legitimately, to

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

153

bear legal interest; till then lending on interest
had been considered dishonorable ; a practice de¬
fensible only towards the stranger — “who is the
enemy,” says the unlovely God of the Jews.
Lending money for profit was condemned by the
Pope and Councils. Such as were addicted to
the practice were hated and condemned. Ex¬
posed to danger of every sort, they jeopardized
their lives and fortunes. The Jews of the Mid¬
dle Ages, those accumulators of gold and silver,
alive to the risks incurred by their beloved gold,
put their faith in the promises neither of king
nor nobles, and only advanced moneys on the
deposits of precious stones, or on equally good
security.

The bourgeois rehabilitated usury, and exalted
the business of the money-lender into one of the
most lucrative and honorable of civilized func¬
tions ; to live on one’s income as a fund-holder
is the bourgeois’ ideal life. In the 16th century,
while Calvin, the authorized representative of
the religious manifestation of the bourgeois eco¬
nomic revolution, was legitimating the lending on
interest in the name of all the theological virtues,
the Chancellor Duprat laid the foundations, in
France, of the public debt by creating in 1522
perpetual annuities at a rate of interest of 8 per
cent, called rentes de V hotel de ville. The public
debt became the saving-bank of the bourgeoisie,
where they deposited the money they could find
no employment for in business. In earlier ages,
the temple of Jerusalem, the house of Jehovah,
filled that office ; it served as a bank for deposits,
and the Jews from every part of the world stored

154

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

their precious metals there ; but those deposits
bore no interest.

The public debt is a bourgeois improvement.
The kings of France, prior to 1789, still imbued
with the feudal ideas on usury, were wont, on an
emergency, to lower the rate of interest by a
fourth or one-half, and at times even to suspend
payment. Other European sovereigns acted quite
as unceremoniously by their fund-holders. This
aristocratic fashion of treating their creditors has
been made a constant reproach to the feudal gov¬
ernment by the bourgeoisie : one of the first acts
of the Bourgeois Revolution of 1789 was to pro¬
claim the inviolability of the public debt and to
place it above all political revolutions and all con¬
tingent changes of government. The public debt
was thenceforward solidly constituted. “The
public debt,” says Marx, “becomes one of the
most powerful levers of primitive accumulation.
As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it en¬
dows barren money with the power of breeding,
and thus turns it into capital without the neces¬
sity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks
inseparable from the employment in industry or
even in usury. The State creditors actually give
away nothing, for the sum lent is transformed
into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on
functioning in their hands just as so much hard
cash would.”* It is just as if the bank-notes bore
interest.

The establishment of the public credit, while
it afforded a hitherto unparalleled security to the

Karl Marx, “Capital, tf chap. xxxl.

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

155

individual capitalist, enhanced the influence of
the financiers to whom the Government were
obliged to apply for money, a fact, however, which
in no wise prevented the kings of the old regime
from treating them like the Jews of the Middle
Ages ; dragging them before the courts of jus¬
tice, despoiling and hanging them. Howbeit, a
century before the Revolution of 1789 their in¬
fluence in society had become so considerable that
the highest nobility solicited the favor of giving
their daughters in marriage to the upstarts of
finance, in order to acquire the right of sharing
their millions.

The social ascendency gained by finance, and
which keeps on growing, is an economical neces¬
sity at a time when great commercial, industrial,
and agricultural enterprises, banks, railways,
canals, high furnaces, etc., have outgrown the
means of private capitalists to carry them out,
and require associated capital for their execu¬
tion ; the function of the financier is first to ac¬
cumulate capital and afterwards to distribute it
according to the requirements of industry and
commerce. In a society based on mechanical in¬
dustry, the importance of the capital sunk in the
instruments of labor (the constant capital of
Marx) ; the quantity of circulating capital ( vari¬
able capital ) ; the rapidity and abundance of pro¬
duction ; the distance from the markets, the time
required for the sale of the goods and realization
of the payments, all make of finance the pivot of
the economic system.

But finance, mechanical industry, and modern
methods of cultivation could not develop without

156

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

essentially modifying the character of property,
by converting it from a personal thing into an
impersonal thing; biding the time when it shall
resume its primitive form and once again be¬
come common.

In the system of small landed property and
petty industry, property was an appendage of the
proprietor, as his implement was an appendage
of the artificer. An industrial enterprise de¬
pended upon the personal character of the pro¬
prietor: his thrift, activity, and intelligence, just
as the perfection of his work depended upon the
skill of the artificer who handled the implement.
It was impossible for the proprietor to sicken,
age, or retire without endangering the success of
the industrial undertaking of which he was the
soul. He fulfilled a social function that had its
pains and penalties, it profits and rewards. Prop¬
erty, at that epoch, was truly personal, whence
the popular saying : “La propriete est le fruit du
travail.” But modern production has reversed
the terms ; the capitalist is no longer an appen¬
dage of his property whose prosperity no longer
depends upon his individual worth. The eye of
the master has lost its occupation. All great
financial, agricultural, and industrial undertak¬
ings are directed by administrations more or less
successfully organized and highly paid. The
function of the modern proprietor consists in
pocketing his income and squandering it on wine
and women ; not a social function is, in our day,
assigned to the proprietor in the technical organ¬
ization of producers who are all wage-laborers.
After having filled a useful part in production,

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

157

the proprietor has become useless anri even a
nuisance, as a bourgeois economist remarks.

Political economists, who are but the overpaid
apologists of bourgeois society, have sought- to
justify the tax levied by capital on the produce
of labor in the shape of interest, ground rent,
profits, etc., by pretending that the capitalist ren¬
ders useful service by his abstinence, his admin¬
istrative ability, and so forth. If it was possible
. r Adam Smith to defend this specious proposi¬
tion with some show of reason, the Giffens,
Roschers, Leroy-Beaulieus, and other such small
fry of political economy, ought really, if they
would continue to draw their salaries from the
middle-class for their interested special pleadings,
to set their wits to work to devise something less
palpably absurd than the pretended usefulness of
the capitalist in the modern system of great
mechanical production.

Mechanical production has robbed the artisan
of his technical skill and turned the wage-laborer
into a servant of the machine; the capitalistic
organization of industry has made a parasite of
the capitalist. The parasitical nature of his role
is recognized and proclaimed by the creation of
anonymous companies whose shares and obliga¬
tions the bourgeois’ titles of property — pass
from hand to hand, without exerting any influ¬
ence on production, and on the Stock Exchange
change hands a dozen times a day. The Roths¬
childs, Grants, Goulds, and other financiers of
that stamp, practically demonstrate to the capi¬
talists that they are useless, by cheating them
out of their shares and bonds by Stock Exchange

158

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

swindling, and other financial hanky-panky, and
by accumulating in their strong boxes the profits
derived from the great organisms of production.

In the days when the feudal baron dwelt in his
fortified castle, in the midst of his vassals, ad¬
ministering justice to them in time of peace, and
donning his armor and putting himself at the
head of his men to defend them in cases of in¬
vasion, the feudal nobility was a class essen¬
tially useful and which it was impossible to sup¬
press ; but so soon as a relative tranquillity had
been established in the country, and as the towns
and boroughs, converted into strongholds, be¬
came capable of defending themselves, the nobles
ceased to be wanted ; they abandoned their cas¬
tles and betook themselves to the ducal, episcopal,
royal, and imperial courts in which they ended
by becoming a body estranged from the nation,
and living on it parasitically : that very moment
their doom was sealed. If the nobility have not
in all European nations been as brutally mowed
down as they were during the French Revolu¬
tion in 1789, they have yet everywhere forfeited
their feudal privileges, and become merged in
the ranks of the bourgeois, from whom, at pres¬
ent, they only distinguish themselves by the ab¬
surdity of their aristocratic pretensions. In cap¬
italistic nations the nobility have disappeared as
a ruling class. The same fate awaits the cap¬
italist class. The day that the capitalist ceased
to have a function to perform in social produc¬
tion, the death-warrant of his class was signed;
it remains but to execute the sentence pronounced
by the economic phenomena, and the capitalists

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

159

who may survive the ruin of their order will lack-
even the grotesque privileges of the pedigreed
nobility to console them for the lost grandeur of
their class. Machinery which has killed the ar¬
tificer will kill the capitalist.

VI

Civilization, after having destroyed the rude
and simple communism of the beginnings of
humanity, elaborates the elements of a complex
and scientific communism. Just as in primitive
times, labor is today performed in common, and
the producer owns neither the instruments of
labor nor the products of his labor. The produce
of labor is not, as yet, shared in common, as was
the case with the savage and barbarian tribes;
it is monopolized by idle capitalists whose sup¬
pression is now but a question of time and op¬
portunity. Let the parasites of property have
been swept away, and communistic property will
affirm itself and implant itself in society. In
primitive society property was common only
among members of the same tribe, connected by
the ties of blood ; every human being not in¬
cluded in the narrow circle of kinship was a
stranger, an enemy; but in the society of the
future, property will be held in common by all
the members of the great human family, with¬
out distinction of nationality, race, or color; for
the workers, bowed under the same capitalistic
yoke, have recognized that brothers in misery,
brothers in revolt, they must remain brothers in
victory.

160

BOURGEOIS PROPERTY

This final communist and international revo¬
lution of property is inevitable; already, in the
midst of bourgeois civilization, do the institutions
and communistic customs of primitive times re¬
vive.

Universal suffrage, the mode of election em¬
ployed by savages and barbarians in electing
their military chiefs and sachems, is re-estab¬
lished, after having been set aside by the bour¬
geois governments who had proclaimed it the
basis of political power.

In primitive ages, habitations were common,
repasts were common, and education was com¬
mon. In our municipal schools children are
taught gratuitously and in common; in some
cities they are beginning to receive gratuitous
repasts. In our restaurants civilized folk are be¬
ing poisoned and cheated in common, and in the
many-storied houses of our large cities they are
cooped up in common like rabbits in a hutch.

If universal suffrage is a juggle; if our town
houses are unwholesome ; if the rest of our in¬
stitutions, affecting a mock communistic charac¬
ter, are a bane to those whom they profess to
benefit, it is because they evolve in a bourgeois
society and are established for the sole behoof
of the capitalist. None the less are they of
capital importance ; they destroy individualistic
instincts and form and fashion men for the com¬
munistic habits of the society to come.

Communism exists in a latent form in bour¬
geois society ; circumstances, not to be foreseen,
will cause it to burst forth openly, and will re¬
instate it as the only possible form of future so¬
ciety.

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HB 701 .L17

Lafargue, Paul, 1842-1911
The evolution of property from

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Lafargue, Paul

The evolution of property from
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